Ignition Point
by MechanixAngel
Summary: Life is going perfectly for Crystal Flakko, a sixteen year old living in Spruce Arbor in the Minecraftian Republic. And of course, everything takes a turn for the worst when she is visited by someone from another reality where things ended up differently who has a secret just like hers. Now it is up to them and three others to save every reality from a force unlike any other.
1. Spruce Arbor

** Hello for the first time in what has been much, much too long, faithful readers!**

** I have taken initiative to continue my writing career, and it all starts with Ignition Point, which basks in glory before your eyes! Unravel the mystery of Crystal Flakko and the people and crazy things she encounters… before it's too late! XD**

** So, some clarifiers first. MOST IMPORTANTLY, I am so, so sorry HPE24 for forgetting you in the credits of TPoM for that section for people who have been there for a considerably long amount of time, and whatnot. That was really, really, bad of me to do that, but I'm saying it here so that everyone will see, or else they wouldn't notice if I just changed TPoM. So yeah. Round of applause for her.**

** Also, this story is officially being beta-ed by FullMoonFlygon herself! It's awesome, so everybody has to give her your awesome well wishes because today is also her birthday! HAPPY BIRTHDAY FMF YAYAYAYAYAY**

** I overreacted. A little bit. Anyways, most importantly concerning this story. **_**EVEN IF YOU DON'T NORMALLY READ A/Ns THIS RIGHT HERE IS SUPER IMPORTANT! **_**Okay, so, if you enjoyed the parts of TPoM with all the guns and fighting and stuff, then you are going to LOVE TPoM II because it is a mix of both that and the Minecraftia stuff because it is a lot more important this time around. However, I know that there are also lots of people who don't like how that story is so unique that I'm actually incorporating a non-cliché Earth storyline, so this story is much more mainstream. No Earth, no guns, no awesome scenes where helicopters crash land and Navy SEALs are screaming bloody murder, none of that here. XD So yeah. I encourage you to read both, of course, but I'm just saying.**

** More stuff on TPoM II: it obviously releases on Saturday this week, three days from the time that I am writing this snazzy author's note. These two stories will update simultaneously, for example, I'll write a chapter of this, and then a chapter of TPoM II. One Shadow Stranger (TPoM II's official title) is going to be the same length as the original, forty chapters and an epilogue. Ignition Point is going to be considerably less, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty chapters. I'm still planning. This is because this story is a little shorter, and also, I want to get to work on my TMD spin-off about Mech, and it is not possible to write that until FMF is done with the actual TMD in the first place. XD So I'll wait on that, because I can't possibly write three stories at once, can I?**

** That's pretty much it. TPoM II will release early in the morning, most likely around 10 AM Eastern Standard Time. I don't feel like doing the math for you guys who live across the world like Flu and HPE, but I assume that that is the middle of the night for you guys. So just stay frosty once you wake up. It will release with three chapters, and I haven't started the fourth yet. I won't until I finish the second chapter of Ignition Point.**

** Okay. It's all out. (Takes deep breath) And now, finally, long overdue, LET THE FREAKING STORY COMMENCE!**

** MechanixAngel's back, baby!**

** ~My friend at school**

**I**

**Spruce Arbor**

There's something magical about looking out the window the minute that you wake up to see piles of snow. The snow usually came for the first time of the year in October, but it was early this year; it was only September 14th and the grass wasn't visible thanks to the white fluff. The window in my room was frosted to the point that it looked like a wall of ice. Goosebumps popped out along my forearms and thighs. I had worn a simple T-shirt and black shorts to bed, not anticipating any cold weather this early in the year.

I pressed my hand to the glass as I stared out at our backyard. The glass was just as cold as the air inside of my room. I turned away from the window after withdrawing my hand and going to my dresser. Unlike most girls my age, I didn't care what I wore on a daily basis, picking out a black sweater and throwing it on over my thin purple shirt. I also traded out my shorts for black jeans and hooked up my inventory belt. It was powered by redstone and built mostly out of iron, and fit comfortably around my waist.

I opened the wooden door to my room and made my way downstairs. It seemed that my parents were still asleep in their room next to mine upstairs, so I was the only one awake in the house. Once I reached the bottom of the stairs, I turned into the kitchen and got out a bowl and a box of cereal. Pouring the wheat flakes into a bowl with a splash of milk and cocoa beans and setting it down at the table, I took another glance outside. The sky to the west was still orange, so no wonder my parents were still sleeping.

While I spooned some of the food into my mouth, I opened one of my school books. I hadn't finished my homework from the night before, and it was already six in the morning. School started in two hours, and I had to get ready and shovel out the path to our house from the stone brick street that cut through our lawn. Even once the snow was off of it, it would be coated with ice and in turn still be slippery. That was a job for my secret.

My mind getting sidetracked from my homework question (_How long does a ball of clay take to be smelted into brick at three hundred degrees?_), I held my hand up in front of me and concentrated. There was a small tingling feeling in my palm, and I screwed up my eyebrows. There were a couple of sparks, and a small flame grew in the palm of my hand. It wasn't normal for anyone to be able to do that, but for some reason, I was able to create fire in my hand since I had been old enough to concentrate on anything. Of course, I couldn't tell anybody, because the doctors in our town would probably designate it as some medical condition. I would be detained to some facility, quarantined, who knows what. But it wasn't normal.

I turned back to my homework question. After taking a couple more bites of my cereal, I still couldn't figure it out, so I went to the next question in frustration. _How was the Great Peace restored? _ History at least was easier for me than science. After all, it was much more important anyways. Science was completely pointless to me, considering how simple everything was. Learning about why the world was like it is in a political fashion actually meant something, because you learned what had happened to your ancestors and why the Minecraftian Republic was divided as it is. Science didn't help you with that. Science just let you learn the specifics of things that were common sense, like why did this do that. I didn't care why sand turned into glass. If it did, then it did. What was important was that it did, and not why.

_The treaty of the four districts that ended the Overworld War. _ There had been a war about seventy years ago before that ended up in the four different states grouping together in an armistice resulting in the Minecraftian Republic. The districts remained separate, but were still together as a whole politically. It was just easier to keep the districts separate because they were different biomes. I lived in the Frozen Frontier, a taiga, which was to the north of the capital of the country, Emerald City. To the west was the jungle, the Treetop Territory. South of the capital was the Deserted Dunes, a desert. Finally, on the east were the Sky Straits, a series of tall mountains that generated the country's mining income. They all surrounded the capital perfectly, and on the outside of the territories was a giant ocean. There were probably other continents to be discovered, but right now we lived on a giant island. The biomes were definitely large, with three or four large cities each. Spruce Arbor was the city that was the farthest to the north in the entire country, so we got snow first.

When it got cold this far north, it really got cold. In January and February it dropped to extremely low temperatures, and the snow season could stretch through April sometimes. It wouldn't be too cold today, considering that the season just started, but I still needed long clothes so that I wouldn't freeze to death. That was overdramatic, but it was still cold.

Once I had finished my homework, I scarfed down the rest of my meal and headed upstairs to quickly finish getting ready. My parents were still asleep as the door was closed and it was quiet inside. I opened the door to my room and crossed past my bed to the door into my bathroom, where I turned on the lanterns so I could see the mirror there.

For a sixteen year old I was relatively short, coming in at just five foot eight. My straight blond hair fell past my shoulders on both sides of my head, lighting up my fair skin. I had thin lips and a nose that stuck out a little bit, like a guy's. That embarrassed me sometimes, my friends making fun of my appearance because of it. My best feature, I thought, were my dark green eyes, which stood out around my pupils. They were definitely nothing like Herobrine's, which were just plain white.

The thought of Herobrine shifted my focus a little bit, and I wondered for the hundredth time we were learning about science in school instead of creationism. It was obvious that the Creation Story of Notch and Herobrine creating Minecraftia together, Notch being worshipped by the people of his world and Herobrine forever residing in the inaccessible dimension of the Nether, was true. Everyone believed it anyways, so why were we learning useless science?

I brushed my teeth and used mouthwash and then headed downstairs. Making sure that I had all of my school books and homework on my toolbelt, I opened the door outside and got out my stone shovel. The cold air blasted me quickly with a large gust of wind, spreading some stray snowflakes on my shirt and a few inside my house. I got out and closed the door so that nothing else would fly in and stared at the path ahead of me. The path to the road was two blocks wide, completely made out of stone bricks. It was ten blocks long from the street to the door of our house. The snow was deeper in the grass because it stuck better there, coming up to about three inches tall. On the stone path it was just about one inch, though.

Less snow on the path made my job easier. Our family had a rule: whenever snow fell, the first person to leave the house was the one who had to clear the path. Because of school, that unfortunately meant me most of the time. I didn't mind, though. Having something mindless to do before a day full of solving math problems and going over sciences helped me clear my head.

I shoveled the snow aside, piling it on the snow that had already come down on top of the grass. Realizing that I hadn't checked the time since I had gotten breakfast, I took a glance at my watch. It was seven at this point. This usually took about fifteen minutes, but I couldn't say for sure. It had been a couple months since I had had to clear out the snow.

Every small drift of snow that was cleared away exposed some more of the icy stone brick. I was about halfway through the job when I turned back. It would be even easier to walk on it if it wasn't coated in ice, and since I couldn't just build a fireplace right here, I would have to use my special ability. It was too early in the morning for anyone to be walking around anyways, especially with it being snowy outside. Everyone would have to transition to having to clear out their paths to the street from now on, and I was usually one of the first people at school anyways. There would be no difference in the order of people getting there.

Assuring myself this, I concentrated on opening my fists so that the faced the icy surface in front of me, like I was pointing a weapon. All of a sudden, a huge burst of fire shot out of both my hands, instantly melting the ice and making me stumble backwards in surprise. I quickly turned off the fire, and quickly darted my head around to see if anyone had seen. Nobody could shoot fire out of their hands, and it was pretty obvious that I wasn't holding any flint and steel. I surveyed the street, looking for anyone who was there. There was someone, standing at the side of a house across the street on an angle, right next to the corner where he could duck behind it. He was about my age, but I didn't notice that he was there until my eyes had passed, and when I looked back he wasn't there anymore. He must have just been my imagination, but I didn't dare using the fire again.

As I finished clearing out the path, I kept frantically looking around for any sign of the boy again. The more I thought about it, the more weird that it seemed. The house was occupied by an older couple, and that was it. The boy that I had seen had been about my age, I was sure about it. I couldn't remember any of his specific physical features, but that wasn't really important. What was important was that he was there.

Maybe he was going to break into their house. I doubted it. There wasn't any real crime in the Minecraftian Republic except for in the slums in the south of Emerald City. It wasn't called the Great Peace for nothing, I reminded myself. But still, it worried me what the guy would think since I had literally just shot fire out of my hands.

Why was I so worried, I told myself. He was probably just a part of my imagination, triggered by a fear of getting caught by accidentally shooting a huge burst of flame. That was the only reason that I didn't like using the fire all the time; there was no way for me to control how powerful it was once I conjured it. Well, I was sure that there was some way to, but I couldn't exactly go to any random person and ask them, could I?

Once I finished it was already seven fifteen, and I put my shovel back into my toolbelt and walked along the side of the street. It was only a little walk to the school on the left, but I headed right to go to my friend Willow's house. There was no snow falling at the moment, but it was still cold outside; the wind would probably pick up as the day progressed.

Willow's house was a short three houses over from mine. She usually got outside at around seven thirty, and if I reached the house before she got outside I would just wait on the street in front of her house. She was standing outside on the edge of the path this morning, though, the stone bricks already cleared. I raised a hand in greeting.

She was average height, about five foot ten, so a little bit taller than me. She had short black hair that was cut just above her eyebrows and stretched down to her neck in the back, which stood out just like her deep blue eyes. "Hey Crystal," she greeted me as I stopped in front of her. "Guess it's the time of year again to shovel out the snow."

I cracked a smile. "Yeah. Did you have to do it this morning? It wasn't that deep today," I commented as we began to walk back in the direction I had just come.

She shook her head. "My dad had to get to work early this morning, so he had the honors of clearing out the first snow of the season," she replied, and then smirked. "Not that it's an honor that I want to have to carry out." Her dad was actually the assistant to the mayor of Spruce Arbor, so he basically carried out exercises when the mayor wasn't available. The job paid pretty well, but I couldn't complain about my own father's job; he was a researcher on topics about history, on how the wars before the Great Peace had carried out and all about Notch. I suppose that this was why history was my favorite subject, but I liked it a lot myself.

We passed my house, and the light in my parents' room was on. They must have woken up now, even though I was already out of the house. They had always been heavy sleepers, but this was an extreme example of it. My mom worked at the same company as my dad as a receptionist, since they didn't need someone to stay home and look after me anymore. Willow's mom had a boy who was in seventh grade and a girl in just third grade. They were large intervals, so her mom had to stay home for much longer in her life than I would have liked to.

There were some other kids on the street now, all of them around our age. Although high school started at eight in the morning, the other kids didn't have to get to class until nine, giving them an extra hour of sleep, plus the chores that the early risers had to do like shoveling snow out of the house path. You get the idea. It was easier for younger kids.

At last we reached the end of Leaf Lane, the street that the two of us lived on, where it intersected with Wooden Walkway. Across from Leaf Lane was the Spruce Arbor High School, standing tall and magnificent in the early morning light. The sun was rising behind us in the east, giving us shadows that outpaced us on the ground in front of Willow and I.

As we walked through the front lawn of the high school, which was littered with random spruce trees, some tall and some quite short, I noticed that many of the kids were getting here at the same time as me. Was I really that late today?

Obviously, it didn't matter who got to school first as long as you got there on time, but I liked being known as one of the people who got there first by the teachers. It made me feel more responsible, in a way. At least I had an excuse today; everyone would have to transition into a different routine starting today. So I could cut myself some slack, for now.

As the two of us reached the doors, I saw the guy again. He was standing next to one of the spruce trees, not too far away from the school's main doors. I stopped momentarily as there was no one immediately behind us, trying to get a better look at him. He had brown hair that hung over one of his eyes in a mop hairstyle. He was wearing a red long sleeved shirt and blue jeans, and he stared out at me, not bothering to hide. This was definitely the same person who might've seen me this morning.

"Crystal? Are you okay?" Willow asked from my left while I stared in the opposite direction, shaking my head to bring me back to reality.

"Yeah, I'm fine," I assured her, starting to walk up to the glass doors again alongside her. "I thought I might have forgotten something for a second." There, that was a pretty good lie. As she pushed open a door I glanced back quickly. The boy wasn't there anymore. It must have been my imagination again, and I desperately tried to convince myself that this time. Nobody would just follow me around…

Then again, there was a perfectly good reason to. I strode through the closing door and slid back into place next to Willow in the main hallway of the high school. The school year had just started, this being the Thursday of the second week of school. Now that I was in eleventh grade, I was sure to expect tougher work that would help me get prepared for a life with an actual job, not a part time one like some kids had. The legal working age in the Minecraftian Republic was fourteen, but I figured I hadn't needed one yet. I was planning to get one by the end of the year, though. Willow didn't have a job either.

The two of us turned to our right and went down the hallway for eleventh graders, there being separate areas of the school to make it as little confusing as possible. Thankfully, Willow and I had the same homeroom together: English, Room 134 with Ms. Brady. We entered together, and once again it pained me to realize that there were already five of the thirty kids in our class already seated in their individual seats. There were five vertical rows that faced the front of the room, where Ms. Brady's desk sat. I was in the second seat of the fourth row of the door, while Willow sat on the opposite side of the room. The two of us parted ways and went to sit down in our seats.

Ms. Brady wasn't here yet, which I realized was a good luck charm that I hadn't seen coming. Since she wasn't here, then she would have no way to know that I hadn't been the first one into class, as usual. I furrowed my eyebrows. Why was I so concerned about this?

As the students filtered in over the next twenty minutes, there was still no teacher behind Ms. Brady's desk. Just five minutes from the bell, with only two seats in the classroom still vacant, a short, stout old woman walked in through the door and ruffled some papers into a pile on Ms. Brady's desk at the front of the room. I heard some groans from the back of the room. Most people didn't like having substitutes in this class, considering that Ms. Brady was really nice. She wasn't strict about anything at all, so her being here opened the door for another teacher that might not expect the class' excessive talking.

The woman didn't seem to notice the groans, or rather, she chose not to. The two last people filtered into the classroom, and when the noteblocks installed in the ceiling of every classroom and the hallways of the school gave their four chimes, she stood up once more and straightened some round glasses that sunk a little on the bridge of her nose.

"Hello everyone. My name is Ms. Greene, and I'll be your teacher today. Ms. Brady is out with the cold because of the sudden weather, and I expect that you all will be on your best behavior for me, correct?" she spoke in a high pitched voice, and we said our approval in polite voices. She nodded curtly and went back to reading the top paper on her large stack. I assumed that it must have been class instruction or something of the sort. "You all had homework due today, please put that on your desk."

I spun around the icons on my toolbelt and picked out the worksheet about diagramming sentences. Personally, I liked reading books and writing essays and stuff, but this kind of homework was just a pain in the neck. Basically, diagramming sentences is when you analyze any given sentence and make some complicated chart of the different parts of speech and what words correspond to others. I did it, but that didn't mean that I understood it.

Luckily, the homework had been a simple five problems of this, and it had taken me just over ten minutes last night. I laid it out on my desk, with my name inscribed neatly in the top right corner: _Crystal Flakko_. It was a pretty name, I thought, but then again I couldn't judge my own name without realizing that it made me feel a little bit full of myself. It felt weird to do that, as if I was some popular girl who couldn't get enough of herself. In truth, I wasn't all that popular, but Willow was really all I needed. We went together like potatoes and carrots.

I smirked at my own comment as I waited for Ms. Greene to pass around the room and reach my desk. That wasn't that great of a simile, but then again, this was English class and I might learn a better way to express our relationship at any second.

As I assured myself this out of boredom, the substitute teacher curled around the front of the third row and came down my way. She took the paper from the girl in front of me, Beth, and proceeded so that she was on my left. I handed her my worksheet and she took it from me and put it in a little stack of them in her hand. "Thank you, Ms..." she started, adjusting her glasses as she stared down at my name. "Flakko." She continued on as I frowned. Flakko wasn't that hard to pronounce, even though it wasn't that common of a name.

"And where is your homework, young man?" she asked from behind me, staring down at a hulky kid named Charlie who sat directly behind me. His desk was indeed bare except for a black pen that didn't have a cap on.

"My wolf ate it while I was sleeping," he said, trying not to smile apparently. I didn't like Charlie. He was basically the school bully, but no one really called him that. He never did his homework and he never studied for any tests as far as anyone knew, and yet he scraped by every year with a passing score. Barely.

"Well, that's a sorry, made-up excuse, and I think that we both know that," Ms. Greene responded bitterly, marking down a little note on a piece of paper. She continued on past Charlie while I stared back at him, just a little bit too long.

"What do you think you're looking at, girl?" he spat, and I quickly turned back around so that I was facing the front again. I didn't want to get into an argument with anyone, especially not Charlie. He probably had the power to tear my heart out in an instant, and he probably had the guts to do it right here and now, too.

Once Ms. Greene had finished collecting homework, she walked back up behind the desk at the front of the room and set the homework sheets in a small pile, and picked up another sheet. "You guys are lucky. You don't have much on the agenda today. Just finish these worksheets by eight thirty and we'll discuss the answers. You'll move on to second period at nine," she announced, bringing out the sheets and giving the first person in each row six sheets so that we could pass them back to each other, sparing her the extra walking.

When Beth reached back over her arm and I took one of the sheets and passed the rest back to Charlie, the papers suddenly fell against the floor. Ms. Greene looked up and immediately at me instead of Charlie, who I knew had dropped them on purpose. He had had a firm grip on them when I let go, and I glanced back at him as he bent over to pick up the sheets.

Suddenly, while I watched Charlie pick up the paper sheets innocently, Ms. Greene was standing over my desk. "Ms. Flakko, I will not have disruptions in my class. Please pass back papers in an orderly fashion. It isn't that hard," she scolded me, turning on her heel back to the front of the classroom by her desk.

I looked across the classroom at Willow, who mouthed '_What was that all about?_' to me. I shook my head lightly and turned my head back down to the first question on the sheet. There were ten of the diagramming sentences problems on this sheet, compared with the five on the homework, and these sentences were longer. There was no way I could finish this.

The first sentence annoyed me as I stared down at it, trying to figure out the way to break it down in the white space below it. _The Minecraftian shot an arrow at the aggressive creeper from ten feet away. _ As I started writing, I chewed my lip in annoyance. Where in the world could a person use this in life once school was done. I mean, wasn't school supposed to prepare you for life once you were an adult? This wasn't preparing me for anything, this was just nonsense that I had to do when I was a kid that most adults didn't know about.

Something sharp hit me in the back, and I flinched. "Ouch!" I exclaimed under my breath, but Ms. Greene still shot me a look from behind the desk in the front. I realized that she thought it was me being disruptive and quickly got back to work, not even trying to figure out what had caused the sharp poking. That was a mistake.

It happened again, but whatever point the sharp tip was dug deeper into my neck and for a longer duration, in turn increasing the pain. I flinched again, bit my tongue so that I wouldn't express the pain through words, and turned around sharply. Charlie was sitting there with his pen in hand, the tip of it a really thin ballpoint. The sickening smile on his face was enough to tell me that it was him that had been poking me, but there was nothing that I could do about it.

"Excuse me, Ms. Flakko!" a familiar high pitched voice said shrilly from the front of the classroom, "We do not look at other people's papers in this school environment. You have been disruptive enough, if there is one more disturbance from you…" Ms. Greene seemed to falter off, I suppose because she didn't have any sort of proper consequences for me.

I gulped nervously, now really committed to staying quiet so that I could just finish this worksheet and get out of this classroom at nine, on time. _The Minecraftian shot an arrow at the aggressive creeper from ten feet away. _ Well, 'from' was the preposition or something, I think, so that would mean that it would go _here_, under 'ten feet away'. Right?

There weren't any disturbances for a little bit, and I had made it to the fourth question by eight fifteen when there was another sharp poke in my neck. This time, though, it was _really _painful. I jumped in my seat and turned around again, not bothering to think what the substitute teacher might think of my behavior. Charlie was still smiling at me, with that sickening grin that only someone with something to hide would carry around on their face with such pride.

"Can I _help _you?!" I exclaimed a little too loudly, my blood turning to fire. When I realized what was about to happen, I turned back around quickly, leaving my threat at a very awkward position. Oh Notch, don't let me start a fire here, please don't let me start a fire…

I knew that feeling that meant I was about to from out of control anger. I had only done it once before, a couple of years ago, but I had luckily been able to conceal it from the teacher that had made me angry by giving me a bad grade on a report just because she didn't like me as a student for no particular reason. Whenever that feeling washed over again, I had to make an effort to cool down quickly, or suffer the harsh consequences of catching fire in school.

However, this wasn't good enough for Ms. Greene that I had just prevented myself from catching ablaze, because she obviously didn't know that. She strode over above my desk, taking some more notes on her notepad and adjusting her glasses menacingly. I sunk a little lower in my seat, trying to look more innocent and working on the next problem of my sheet. It wasn't fooling anyone, in fact, everyone was shooting me sideways glances every now and then because of the threat I had announced to the class and then just left hanging in the air.

"Ms. Flakko, I think that now would be a good time for you to leave this classroom," Ms. Greene said from over me, staring down with notepad in hand. My blood was still simmering, and I breathed slowly as I responded to her.

"You don't understand, Ms., he was insistently poking me in the back while I tried to work…" I began to explain, but she would have none of it, cutting me off.

"I believe that I don't want to hear another word from you, young lady," she scolded me, picking up my paper and walking back to the front of the classroom, staring expectantly at me. I had just been kicked out of class. I shot another glance at Charlie behind me, who was smiling with a wider grin than ever. What a freaking jerk to do this to people who actually cared about getting good grades, I thought.

With that, I stood up and walked up past her desk, glancing at Willow as I passed her row. She gave me an even more confused look than before, and I just shook my head sadly. It was a lost cause to try and fight my side of the conflict anymore.

As I was closing the door now that I was in the hallway on the way to the principal's office, I heard Ms. Greene announce that "Now that we're rid of that nuisance…" The rest of what she said was drowned out by the closing door, and I curled my hands into fists and bit my tongue in an effort to cool down. Me, a nuisance? I don't think so, Ms. _Mean_!

Twice I had failed myself already this morning. I had shown up to school later than usual, and now I had been kicked out of class before eight twenty. This was shaping up to be a really bad day, and I hadn't even made it out of first period. I kicked the ground in exasperation and annoyance, and then began walking back to the main hallway of the school. The principal's office was opposite from the doors into the school, next to the receptionist's office and clinic. The only people who ever went to the clinic were faking it, I had discovered. It wasn't like anyone had any rotten flesh to chew on, after all.

I couldn't believe how badly I had been framed by Charlie so early in the morning, and there had been absolutely no way for me to protest. There was no telling what kind of punishment that Mr. Arbest, our principal, would enact on me. The teacher hadn't actually told me to go to his office, but where else was I supposed to go once I was kicked out of class during the school day? If there was a better option, I didn't know it.

Except for ditching and just leaving the school for the rest of the day. But I didn't want to do that, truancy was breaking the law.

Twisting the door handle and opening the wooden door to the principal's office, I took a deep breath to try and cool down the apprehension of what was coming. The door opened with my small push and revealed the small room where the principal did his work during the day and corralled kids who had been misbehaving. I had expected no one except for him to be there this early in the morning, but I was proved wrong when I saw his chair facing me from behind his desk and another person in one of the two chairs facing to him, its back to me.

"Well, do you have any school to go to? We're not going to be able to find a place for you to go at the moment if you aren't speaking. Let me call your parents, what is their phone number?" Mr. Arbest said, and then glanced up at me as I entered. His frustrated face became surprised at the sight of me closing the door nervously. "Ms. Flakko? Do you have something to bring to me?" he asked, expecting me to actually be on a mission for a teacher. Like I said, my reputation was slowly going down today in my own eyes, and this wasn't helping.

"No, actually I was sent here by the substitute for Ms. Brady," I croaked out, realizing that my voice had left me and I was really starting to get nervous. I stood with my back against the wooden door, not wanting to take another step into the room, but he beckoned for me to sit in the other seat across from him. I swallowed my fear and walked briskly over.

"I'll be with you in a moment, Ms. Flakko, but right now I'm dealing with a slightly more important issue," he explained, gesturing toward the other person sitting across from him. I couldn't see who it was until I sat down in the wooden chair, and my heart skipped a beat.

It was the boy who had seen me playing with fire.

**There you have it guys, I'm finally back after about a month. I hope you all enjoyed, and of course traditionally for a fan fiction: OC contest! I want those babies flying in as soon as this chapter is released, so just make sure that you include their name, physical description, clothes, personality, and age. The age needs to be between ten and eighteen so that I can work out stuff without having creepy relationships. XD Best three win, and it isn't gender specific. So have fun with it, and I'll see you guys in three days, if not sooner.**

**Mechanix OUT**


	2. Witch Hunt

**Hello once more, faithful readers!**

**Just to make myself clear, there is an OC contest. Make sure that you check out the end of Chapter 1 for all the things that you need to include, and please elaborate if you want yours to be picked. I've gotten quite a few but only two of them have really stuck out to me so far, so make sure that you are really writing a lot. Also, if you are submitting specific weapons, I'm not going to use them for reasons that will become pretty obvious eventually.**

** And now, let the story commence!**

**II**

**Witch Hunt**

My blood instantly turned to ice, a sensation that was the opposite of the fire that it usually boiled like. The presence of that boy haunted me in a way, and as I sat down on the cushioned seat, I averted my eyes from him. I didn't want to make eye contact, because I was sure that he would try and do something to me. There was something about him that just seemed off, but there was no way that I could pinpoint exactly what it was.

"So, what did you say your name was again?" Mr. Arbest questioned, breaking the awkward silence that I had wished would stop, and thank Notch that it did. I swallowed some more nervousness and remembered that he was talking to the other kid right now, so I would be able to collect my thoughts. But just remembering that made me even _more _nervous based on the fact that the boy was here, a couple feet away from me.

"Jake Elwood," he replied quietly, and I looked up at him. He looked even more nervous than I did, barely speaking out of fear, or something equivalent to that. He had been staring at the ground in front of him, but now that I shifted my gaze is way, he met it. His eyes were a very light blue, almost like the color of water.

Just as suddenly, he turned back to the principal and stared hard at him. I raised an eyebrow, no idea what he was doing, but that was when I noticed the window behind Mr. Arbest's desk. It had already been covered in frost, by the ice was increasing so that it completely covered the window. As I noticed this, I looked back at the guy who had said his name was Jake, and he was certainly concentrating on the window with his sight.

The ice crept away from the window and along the walls, freezing them within a layer of ice. The cold spread much more quickly, and a small chill spread through the room like artificial wind, or air conditioning. Suddenly, the entire room was covered in ice, including Mr. Arbest, who was frozen with his mouth open in a light blue transparent tomb. Astonished, I turned back to Jake, who slumped back into his ice covered chair, breathing heavily.

Once the initial shock evaporated, I jumped from my seat and slipped on the icy floor, catching myself against Mr. Arbest's desk. "You did this?!" I cried, amazed and afraid at the same time, not sure which feeling was greater at the moment. He didn't respond right away, catching his breath from what must have been a large effort to create this.

Finally, he stood up, not slipping at all on the ice on his worn out leather shoes as if he had done this plenty of times before, which, I realized, he probably had. "It's no less abnormal than what you did this morning in front of your house," he finally breathed, still panting a little bit, but at least not hunched over like he was injured or something. Me, however, I was frantically looking around the room as everything sparkled like diamonds.

Mr. Arbest looked pitiful in his chair, eyes half closed and mouth slightly opened as if he had been talking when he was frozen, which was probably why he looked like that in the first place. Shivers went down my spine as I stared at him, gripping onto a cup of pencils and pens that was locked against the table so I didn't slip and fall again. People weren't supposed to look like that unless they were dead, but something told me he was still alive.

I turned back to Jake. "Who…" I whispered, shaking my head to clear my thoughts. "Who are you?" He smiled a little bit, extending a hand. Like someone who had been left out in a blizzard, his hand's veins were colored a light blue. His smile turned into a grin, like he took amusement out of the fact that I was standing here amazed while my school's principal lay half dead across the desk from us.

"Jake Elwood, like I already said. There's a lot I need to explain before we leave this room, but most of it concerns your reality and what we can do to try and save it, at least, while there is still time," he responded casually, concentrating on the icy chairs once again. The ice around them faded, leaving no water, so that we could sit in them again.

He did just that, flopping down with his feet up against the office table. I stared reluctantly at him and back at Mr. Arbest, who might've been dead at the moment. Like I said, there was something inside of me that knew he wasn't but it was scary to see him cold and motionless like that. I hesitated to sit down, though, and Jake shrugged. "Suit yourself, but make yourself comfortable. There's a lot to say and not much time to do it."

I shook my head slightly to make sure that I wasn't seeing things. It couldn't be possible, though, because I could very much hear the voice of Jake and feel the cold air circulating through the room. This was realized much to my dismay, because if this was real, then who knew what I was in store for with this guy?

Breathing heavily out of fear, I tried to find my voice, but I couldn't. I opened my mouth but not a sound came out, and I moved my tongue to speak. "Let… Let me go, whoever you are. You aren't a normal person, I mean, look what you just did," I stammered. A makeshift plan developed in my head. I would just play stupid to try and convince him that I hadn't been using fire this morning and that he must have seen someone else if he mentioned it.

Before I set this plan in motion, however, he gave me a face that I read as indicating he meant '_really?_' with his chin tilted a little bit to simulate distrust. My blood began boiling again, and hands seemed to wrap themselves around my ankles to not let me go, knowing within my subconscious that I was indeed going to be caught in the act. If I got too angry with this weird figure, then I would just end up catching fire and giving myself away.

The hands around my ankles squeezed a little tighter to the point that I was uncomfortable in them. That was how I realized that I hadn't actually been imagining. Glancing down at my ankles to make sure that I was imagining the grip on them, I saw ice trapping my foot against the floor so that I couldn't move to get out of the room, or even out of this stance to say the least. I was trapped right here, and my gaze immediately shot up to Jake. He was sitting with his legs up on the table still, the lower part of the legs crossed over one another as if he was content watching me stuck here to see my principal's frozen trap. He met my gaze, mine accusing and angry while he simply looked back lightly, smiling a little bit. "Well, I think that we both know how you can get out of this simple dilemma, correct?" he taunted.

Without him moving or twitching at all, the ice trap crept farther up my legs, halfway up to my knee and crushing my black jeans against my cold skin. It was obvious, I knew that, but it would also mean causing a jet of flame to burst out and melt the ice traps. I looked back up at him frantically, still trying to play dumb in order to get out of this dilemma completely. "Look, I don't know what you're talking about, but please let me and Mr. Arbest go, I don't know why you've been following me all day, and you tried to get in my school, too, and you don't even belong here!" I exclaimed frighteningly, collecting thoughts from his previous conversation with Mr. Arbest that I had only just overheard.

His gaze seemed to falter a bit, the corners of his mouth drooping down slightly as if he realized that this was a mistake and he had just frozen two perfectly innocent people, but just as suddenly the corners of his mouth popped back up and he was smiling, now grinning, looking even more content than he had been before. "Well, _Ms. Flakko_, I am certainly impressed with your desire to keep your secret just that: a secret," he continued, saying the only part of my name that he had learned from his conversation with Mr. Arbest with extra relish, "But I'm afraid that now is the time to come out. You and your principal have been frozen in place with no way out, and yet you have the perfect skill that can save you both from being trapped here forever."

There was absolutely no way that he could keep us both forever, no one could have that amazing amount of strength to do that. After just a minute of conjuring up a small burst of flame I got tired, and that was nothing. Obviously our abilities were connected somehow; him being able to control ice and quite possibly snow, whereas I was able to control fire to some extent. "You can't do that!" I yelled at him, avoiding giving the reasoning behind that assumption. Or at least, I tried to yell, but my voice was small and vulnerable. If I had been yelled at by myself right now, I surely would not have been intimidated to any extent. I'd have to show him that some other way, without using my fire.

I reached down for my redstone powered belt, flicking it so that my stone sword was the highlighted slot on my upper left thigh, and stared at Jake threateningly. If he didn't want to let us go fair and square, then I would have to use a more traditional method than reasoning with him to absolutely no avail. "Look, you don't want to mess with me, _Jake_," I said, echoing his emphasis on the name of the person in subject.

He did nothing except raise an uncaring eyebrow, as if the fact that I was threatening him meant absolutely nothing to him. It probably didn't because he had already proven his unnatural strength while I sat here with nothing to show for my effort except an ice suit that was slowly creeping up my legs. "Look, your principal is simply frozen and knocked out. He's still acquiring oxygen because I'm letting him, but if you get testy, then I might just close those airways off," he countered, and I furrowed my eyebrows in anger.

"Shut up!" I screamed at him, whipping my stone sword out from my toolbelt as it instantly grew in my hands, heavy because of my lack of good footing. I swung it awkwardly at him, and it simply slashed the air where his legs had been. He had moved them in a hurry and now sat in the chair contently with his feet planted on the ground. I swung again, reaching out as far as I could, but he was just out of my reach, my sword slashing air uselessly once more and actually slipping out of my hands and clattering to the ground uselessly.

He glared accusingly at me now, like I was the threat and he was the one trapped in ice. Jake bent over to pick up the sword from its hilt off of the ground, the stone blade coated in frost and the hilt a little bit icy as well from its instant exposure to the air. Another mood swing, I thought as he glared at me with the stone sword in hand. He had gone from being nervous and frail to amused at two people's helplessness and now furious at my attempt to hurt him.

"Look, if you're going to make it out of here alive you're going to have to do it yourself!" he shouted, and I instantly stopped flailing my arms angrily. He had said that he could make Mr. Arbest suffocate any moment that he wanted, and I didn't want that moment to come anytime soon. My effort was useless, however, as the ice crept up my body much faster, past my toolbelt so that I couldn't use anything and up to my chest. "And I don't have to just let your principal kick the bucket, either. You are just as much of a victim as he is right now, and you can go just as easily if you don't show your true abilities," he continued in a calmer voice.

The ice trapped my arms at my sides and crept up my neck, and all of a sudden I couldn't speak and my entire body was covered in ice. I truly was Crystal, because that was what I looked like now: a gem that had been modeled to look like a person.

"Just so you know," Jake continued, sitting back down leisurely in the seat closer to me, staring up at my unmoving eyes so that I couldn't avert my gaze and placing my stone sword on Mr. Arbest's desk, "I'm not a bad person or anything. I need you, and there are three other people who would say the same thing if they were here right now. But you're important, and the very fate of your reality depends on it and your ability. I'm leaving you conscious so that you can bust yourself out, but know that I will definitely leave you here for hours if that is what you wish. I hope I don't have to do that, personally; I've been searching this reality for two weeks in hope that I could find whoever was like you here."

Most of the words that he spoke didn't make sense to me, or at least, what their greater purpose was supposed to mean. What he was speaking of meant that there were other realities, and that mine was just one… No, that was crazy talk. Alternate realities were just a theory that there were limitless other realities, endless possibilities to be found. But it hadn't been proven.

Now this person was suggesting that he in fact had come from another one of those very same alternate realities, and I couldn't believe him. The chances of that were way too low, I was afraid, and besides, why would he be searching for someone like me anyways? Was he planning on having a really big barbecue and he wanted me to start it? He had claimed that the fate of my so-called reality was in the hands of me, but I found that hard to believe.

Jake stood up now, walking over so that his face was inches away from my frozen one. "Please, whatever your name is. You have to help me," he whispered, just audible enough for me to hear. He blinked once, twice, not shifting his gaze by a millimeter.

The ice had frozen my skin now, getting to the point that it was so cold that it burnt like fire. Ironic, because it appeared that my only way out of this situation was to conjure fire like I had learned to somehow since I had been born. I didn't trust this guy, but I also didn't want to be trapped here forever.

Knowing this, I concentrated hard on turning my blood to fire, my body temperature heating up and the ice no longer burning my skin. Beads of sweat froze instantly on my forehead and neck as I made my hands ignite. The fire caught all of a sudden and radiated off of my body, entombing me in flames that slowly melted the ice trap that I was stuck in. Jake took a couple steps back, staring at me in a sort of wonder. There was that stupid smirk again, the one that I had grown to hate in just a few minutes of meeting this person.

The flames intensified so that I looked like a large piece of firewood, the ice reflecting off a million different small light sources that radiated off of my body and slowly melting. Beginning to feel a little bit lightheaded, I intensified the flames to try and get out of this ice as soon as possible. It was only then that I realized that the ice had melted off of my hands and I was free to concentrate on other parts of my body, the flames growing ever brighter, my effort growing ever stronger, his smile growing ever sickening…

I collapsed onto the frozen ground, my eyes closing weakly, Jake walking over to me with that grin on his face I hated, and I closed my eyes. All that I wanted was to escape this dream, whatever it was, it couldn't be real or I would die…

Far to the southeast of Spruce Arbor, a dark cavern began playing cave noise. There was a presence by some being, disturbing the peace of this dark dungeon. Weeks before four travelers had appeared suddenly from the small lapse in space-time that hung over a block where bedrock should have been but instead led down to the Void. They had ran off through the cave, ascending up to the surface of the Sky Straits.

The colony of bats that lived in that very cave had been scared off when they had arrived, flying around in fright with nowhere to actually hide from the group of Minecraftians. It hadn't mattered because that had simply gone off without disturbing the passive mobs, so they had assumed their position once more.

The wrinkle in time, though, grew larger suddenly, expanding to the size of a three by three block wall. The colors of it were the same, a spiral that swirled like a hurricane with every color that anyone could imagine. Normally, though, it was only about the size of one block, and the only time it had ever grown was when the group of travelers passed through it.

Anticipating the arrival of some other presence, the bats slowly grouped together and awaited an opportunity to fly off in a hurry. The moment that they were waiting for arrived; a small form hopped through the wormhole, looking around the room. The bats held position hoping that it wouldn't notice them.

Frightening to the bats, this form was unlike anything that anyone in this reality had ever seen before. It looked like exactly like a skeleton, except for the fact that its bones were solid black and it held a stone sword instead of a bow. It looked around, as if waiting for something to attack it or maybe looking for something specific, and it noticed the bats. They were of no interest to the form, its hollowed out eyes simply passing over the colony of innocent bats and turning back to the wormhole. It made some clicks and chatters using its bones that the bats were not able to understand, but meant this:

_"This is definitely the right reality. Come on out everyone."_

Come out they did, as more and more of the skeleton forms hopped out of the wormhole and began marching off behind the first mob up the cavern that the group of Minecraftians had climbed up weeks ago. The bats feared the mobs, but they didn't seem to want to kill them or anything, so they remained silent and still.

Behind one group of the skeletons was a group of five of some other form of the skeletons. Their heads were black, much like the skeletons, but they floated on a body that looked much like that of some kind of small dragon. The heads, of course, there were three of them on each of the forms, and behind them came even more of the skeletons, and another wave of the dragon beings, and so on. There were hundreds, no, thousands accumulating over about fifteen minutes until the last group of black skeletons hopped through the wormhole and it shrunk back down to normal size.

The sounds of the army of mobs echoed throughout the cavern, clicks and creaks of bones and odd snorts and wails from the dragon forms. All the mobs were chanting the same thing over and over, though: _Ascension, ascension, we make our ascension, ascension, ascension, we make our ascension…_

The colony of bats cowered as the final group of the army marched off in the distance, making their way up to the surface of the Minecraftian Republic. Soon enough they would pop up in the middle of a dark mine in the Sky Straits and unleash havoc while heading west toward Emerald City and more of them speeding northwest through the skies to Spruce Arbor. They knew that the team that had set out to stop them was here, and they would do anything to stop them, no matter how many lives it cost the army.

A cold floor made of ice was what awoke me, the sharp burns of freezing temperatures spreading along my exposed flesh. I jolted up, surprised as much as I was cold. Jake was still there, sitting in the wooden chair that had been facing where I was trapped in ice, although he didn't have the pleased grin he had worn before. Replacing the smile was a look of pity, or maybe even concern. When he saw that I was sitting up, he got out of his chair and guarded the stone sword that lay on the top of Mr. Arbest's desk. My sword.

I didn't mind, however. There was no point in me trying to deny him anything anymore since I had just given away what kind of person I was to him. My blood had stopped boiling with fire, my skin tingling as if adjusting to not being literally burning. The effort of melting my ice trap was what had knocked me out, I realized, the fact that I wasn't used to using my ability for long periods of time; in fact, this was the first time that I had ever tried conjuring fire anywhere on my body except for in the palm of my hand.

My breaths became a small cloud of water vapor every time air exited my mouth or nose, clarifying the freezing temperatures to me weren't just me being cold on the inside in some sort of fear. I sat up on the floor, staring up at Jake as he leaned closer to me from his seat. "That was very good. It's going to need some work, considering you fainting and all, but there is definitely a… dare I say it? There's a spark inside of you that will do just fine," he told me.

The pun was poorly executed, I thought, but that wasn't exactly the most important thing in the dialogue that he had just stated. Why would I need any work to be done on an ability that would send me into a science institution if I displayed it in public? This person wanted something out of me, and I was reluctant to cooperate. However, there would be very little chance for me not to cooperate considering the pain that I had just endured trapped in a giant block of ice. I decided to go along with Jake, at least until he explained himself.

I found my footing somewhat, still slipping a little bit because of the icy ground that Jake had created. He glanced at how I was struggling and made a silent 'o' with his mouth. "I forgot about how that might not be the best walking surface for you," he muttered awkwardly, concentrating on the walls around him. The ice slowly evaporated around us, not quite melting because it left no trace of water on the floors.

Most importantly, Mr. Arbest wasn't encased in ice anymore, and rather sat still at his desk, as if sleeping. Fearing once more that he might be dead, Jake turned to me and shook his head lightly. "Don't worry, he's okay. He should wake up in about ten minutes without any memory of either of us ever being in his office this morning, okay?" he explained nervously.

I nodded in agreement, knowing that it wouldn't be a problem as long as we got out of this room by then. My throat was parched though, and I couldn't speak for some reason. I pointed at my mouth frantically, and Jake stared at me with his eyebrows crossed. "You can't speak? That might be an effect of the ice trap since you retained your consciousness through it. We should go get water for you somewhere," he guessed, and I nodded, walking over to the door of the room. He held it open for me, and I swallowed back more fear. If he was like me, then he had arrived here for a reason; to try and convince me to help him somehow.

The prospects of a person who could supposedly control ice and possibly more elements of the weather travelling along with someone with the same abilities concerning fire definitely hadn't been by some sort of coincidence. The two of us had been meant to meet for some reason, and I worried about what that reason could possibly be.

There was a water fountain in the hallway across from the principal's office, right next to the doors that led back outside. I looked through and saw the heavy piles of snow that had grown overnight and stuck especially well on the grass outside of the school. I walked over to the water fountain quickly, making sure that there was no staff in the hallway. Luckily, since it was in the middle of a period, there were no teachers in the hallways because they were all in their classrooms. While I got a sip of water to clear my throat, Jake walked over to me.

"I never did catch your name, and I don't really fancy calling people by their last name," Jake said jokingly as I bent over and drank. After about twenty seconds or so I took my hand off of the lever that made the water shoot up for someone to drink.

"Crystal Flakko," I replied shortly as I walked up to the doors. This time I pushed them open for him to walk through, and he made a mock bow of thanks before proceeding. I grinned a little bit while he wasn't looking. Maybe I couldn't trust him yet, but he definitely seemed like a nice guy, for all I knew. "How long was I out, anyways?"

"I don't know, but its eight thirty five right now if you're interested in that," he shrugged, continuing along the stone brick path from the school up to the street. "I suppose that we're going to your house, then?"

I smirked from behind him, walking more briskly so that I was beside him. "I guess so, but when did I invite you over?" I replied shortly, looking at him with an eyebrow raised in question. He simply shrugged and kept walking. "Well, if we are going to my place, then I'm going to have to lead the way, aren't I?"

This time he shook his head in disagreement. "Remember that I found out who you were by scoping you out at your house," he corrected me, "So I could lead the way if I really wanted to. But then again, I don't feel like getting lost today."

It was hard not to laugh at that comment because it was just one street from my house to the school, but I led the way anyways. The more trust that I gained out of him, the more that I would be able to squeeze out of him for myself. There were too many strange things that weren't normal, at the top of the list hinting that he came from another reality and stalking me out because of my ability to conjure fire that corresponded to his of ice.

A small flurry of snow had begun to start falling again, resting on top of the snow piles on the grass of the lawns of different houses. If we were caught by anyone that I knew while I was out of school, then the consequences wouldn't be good. Knowing this, the two of us walked briskly back to my house to try and get inside before this happened.

Once we reached the stone brick path in front of my house, I looked at all of the windows from the house's outside. My mom and dad were usually out of the house by this time to go to their jobs, but it was always better to be safe than sorry. Luckily, none of the lights were on in the house, so we proceeded up through the door and into the house.

The icy cold air receded as soon as I closed the door to the outside, putting me back in my comfort zone. Jake seemed to look around a bit, as if scouting for any possible threats. "There's nothing out of the ordinary here," I assured him, flicking on the redstone lights that were installed in the ceilings of my house. "So what do you need to tell me, considering that I'm who you've been looking for?"

He walked into the living room and plopped down on one of the cushioned seats. "Well, there's definitely a lot to say. But let's start out with a proper introduction. My name is Jake Elwood, as you learned earlier," he began, lacing his fingers together.

I sat down across from him, placing my feet atop the ottoman that rested next to my seat. "And I'm Crystal Flakko, and this is my spectacular house!" I responded, gesturing my hands up in an arc to show emphasis of the building we were in.

Jake smirked a little bit before he continued his speech. "This is going to be hard to explain, but basically I come from another reality. In order for you to understand everything, let me just tell you that your world is what the scientists back in mine call a 'base reality'; one of a very small percentage of realities throughout space-time that aren't abnormal in any way, and instead correspond to what the original Creation Story was. The same Creation Story is believed throughout each reality, but it is thought to be more of a legend there. In a world such as yours, it is real, therefore your reality is kind of a base for all others within its frame.

"There are usually hundreds of realities that center around a base one, including mine, for instance, around yours. What is different from mine is that we are far more technologically advanced than you and your people, which has obviously proved to possibly be the downfall of all realities within our system," Jake explained, faltering off at the end and wiping his eyes, which seemed to be getting a little bit moist.

"What happened to your reality?" I asked him pathetically, but there was nothing else that I could really say. He looked up at my eyes, and for a second the air got a little colder.

"I was the assistant of a scientist there, in an underground lab in the Sky Straits," he continued bitterly, frowning as he remembered. "We were testing something that had been done once before a long time ago, and apparently your people have done it too: to make an artificial mob, which we had done with snow and iron golems before. The one we were creating was most peculiar, planned to be made of a soulsand body with three heads, much like a skeleton's except black. The mob was to be dubbed the Wither.

"It would be the ultimate defense system, with the power to shoot skull projectiles that would explode on impact and protect our grand cities from any hostile mob threat. But we messed up on one small thing. When we were collecting DNA from skeletons in order to make the heads, it carried along the hostile mob instincts with it. We made about fifty Withers, and when they were activated they unleashed an attack on all of the Minecraftian Republic.

"We put up a valiant last stand against them, but they surged through the country so easily because of how powerful they were. They began reproducing to build their army and even formed a mutated form of a skeleton, a Wither Skeleton, which was black and held a makeshift stone sword. It became hopeless after about three weeks, and our armies had been pushed back to the underground facility that held the labs where we had created the original Withers. Since the war had begun, I had come out about my powers. I can control all forms of water, as you could see earlier. This includes just normal water, snow, ice, and water vapor, although there aren't that many uses for that last one.

"They sent me through a wormhole to different dimensions that was buried in the underground facility under maximum security to find four others that were like me to complete some prophecy that was part of the Creation Story, but hadn't really been passed down through the centuries and had been lost in history. It involved me corralling the others that were like me so that we could defeat the Withers together. I've assembled the other three, and you are the last step. We need to return to my reality before the Withers are able to access the wormhole to the other realities or else this entire system of realities surrounding yours is doomed," Jake finished, pausing to catch his breath after such a long explanation. I stared at him in wonder. It was too elaborate of a story to have just been made up, but did I want to join him?

It was a crazy story, really, and I was left speechless. Then again, it seemed perfectly valid considering all that I had been through with my ability over fire and now meeting Jake, who himself could control water, apparently. A crazy idea formed in my head as I mulled over all that Jake had just unveiled to me. "Can I have a glass of water?" I asked, barely able to suppress my laughs as I got up to get a cup from the kitchen and set it back down on the coffee table in front of the two seats we were sitting in. Jake stared at the cup, and after just a second or two it was full of perfectly clear water.

I picked up the glass and held it between my hands. It was ice cold, just like I had suspected considering who had poured it for me. Condensation was already beginning to cloud up on the outside of the glass, making small droplets of water that we slide down the side of the glass and create a pool of water on the table if not paid attention to. I took a small sip of the water, just to see how realistic it was. Just like the fire that I conjured and the ice that Jake had demonstrated with in a deadly way earlier, the water was real and nourishing.

After draining the glass and placing it back in the kitchen sink, I shrugged and nodded. "How can I help then?" I queried, sitting back down in the chair across from him. Now don't get me started, I know that I shouldn't have trusted this person. He had threatened death to me and my principal multiple times this morning, and he was claiming things that were muttered by people with mental disabilities regularly. However, I couldn't help feeling somewhat attached to him because of what he had shown me; he was someone like me, someone I could confide in about the fire that I was able to produce at will. My parents weren't to be trusted with that information, and I didn't know if even my lifelong friend Willow was trustworthy enough to be given this information. People were real assholes, I had learned over my life, and Charlie this morning had just been another bitter example. Trusting Jake just seemed more realistic if he had been seeking out someone like me to save his reality and mine, really all of the realities that circled around my life and what I did during it.

"Well, for starters, we need to leave as soon as possible. That would be most advisable so that the Withers aren't able to track me and the others down and completely destroy your reality," Jake answered, and then lowered his voice cautiously. "I mean, no offense to your race, but you guys are really unprepared for any sort of supernatural attack."

Before what he had said really sunk in, I thought of a quick retort. "Only because we usually aren't under supernatural attacks every other week!" I exclaimed shortly.

Jake raised an eyebrow at me in some sort of disbelief. "Well, we didn't either, but we at least suspected some form of it," he shrugged, standing back up and stretching out his arms. "Well, what do you say to my proposal?"

Looking back now, I feel that I should have yes right away. It would have made things a lot more simple, after all. But no, I had to screw everything up, didn't I? "I think that I'm going to think it over, okay? Maybe in the morning tomorrow I'll give you an answer," I replied, standing to go to the stairs up to my room. I knew it was just midday, but all of a sudden I was feeling really tired and I just wanted to sleep through tomorrow morning.

Jake was left standing at the bottom of the stairs, staring up at me with a look of question. "What?" I asked, and he shifted his feet a little bit.

"Well, I don't exactly have anywhere to stay because the three others are spread out around this reality, and if you said yes tomorrow then I would have to meet up with them in Emerald City in order to rendezvous and find a way to work through this Wither situation," he explained, and shook his head. "In short, can I sleep somewhere in your house?"

I stared at him from the top of the stairs. He looked completely hopeless with nowhere to sleep, and I couldn't say no. "Come on up here, you can stay in my room. You have to be really discreet. And if you even _dare _trying anything…" I let my statement hang as he came up the stairs grinning in a boyish sort of way. Did any girl completely understand the wonders of guys and their crazy thoughts? I certainly hope so, because I want to meet that person.

"So you've been looking for me for how long now?" I asked him again, opening the door to my room and then shutting it once he came through and sat down on my bed.

"Two weeks. It's been quite the witch hunt, if I must say so myself," he said.

"Why do you call it a witch hunt?" I asked confusedly.

Jake began laughing at this question, although I couldn't exactly see the humor in it. "You don't actually consider yourself a normal member of society, do you?" he responded.

I frowned, now understanding what he meant. The comment hadn't exactly made me feel good about myself, to be thought of as some sort of witch. It was true that I wasn't a normal Minecraftian, so I saw where he was coming from, but he didn't have to put it that way.

"Oh!" Jake exclaimed, pulling out a small device from his pocket and holding it up for me. "This is some of the technology that I was telling you about. It's called a smartphone." The small device was black with a single button of a white box on the bottom of it and some others on the sides. There was a screen that dominated the side of the object that the button was on. He clicked the button and the screen lit up with some words, but they flashed by as he typed commands into it and flipped and touched icons on the screen with his fingers so fast that I couldn't tell what it was trying to communicate.

"I'll show you some of what it does in a second, but first I need to call the others. We need to group together in Emerald City, even if you aren't coming with. Which I do hope that you agree to, the others did without needing to be persuaded much," he continued, further darkening my spirits with that last comment. Now he was hinting at the fact that I was being slightly uncooperative? I didn't like that at all.

He held the device up so that the top of it was against his ear and the bottom was by his mouth, and then he started doing something amazing: he began talking into the device as if there was someone in it. "Guys, meet up in Emerald City as soon as possible. I got the girl, her name is Crystal Flakko, and she controls fire just like I expected." There was a slight pause as the device seemed to be speaking back to it. "I think so, she says she's going to decide tomorrow morning. Well, it isn't like they're actually here yet! What? Yeah. I know. Three days at most. Okay, see you all then." With that he pressed more buttons and held it in his hand.

"What did you just do?" I asked, completely bewildered at what must have been some crazy sort of magic, not technology. Technology were compasses and clocks, not absolutely crazy things like this.

"Using a phone option on it, I'm able to call anyone else who has one of these and talk to them as if they were standing right next to me when activated. In fact, let me give you your own with ear buds," he explained, handing me an identical device with white wires coming out with little white things on the end of them. "Let me show you something really cool."

He put the little white things, ear buds, in my ears (go figure) and typed some commands into my smartphone. Soon enough, some distortion was carrying through, and it sounded like a song that came out of a jukebox, except… better.

_The righteous rise, with burning eyes of hatred and ill will. Madmen fed on fear and lies, to breed and burn and kill!_

And after every couple sentences of words, more of the distortion sound that had been playing in the background would grow louder and enchant you, this was true music.

_Quick to charge, quick to anger, slow to understand. Ignorance and prejudice, and we walk hand in hand!_

As the sound faded with the beat slowly receding, I gazed at Jake with my mouth open. It was quiet again, and I took out the ear buds and put them on my lap. "That was a band called Crush," he said as I looked at the smartphone in wonder. "A band is a group of people who perform music that they have written together for general entertainment. Crush is my personal favorite."

I simply couldn't think of anything else to say. "Can I hear more?" I asked pathetically, and he laughed as I learned to operate the smartphone. There were many bands in the music section of the smartphone, including Crush, Metal Maiden, and Fate Fighters. We spent the afternoon jamming to his music as I learned the sounds of guitars, basses, drums and the wondrous singing throughout all of the music.

_They seem oblivious to a soft spring rain, like an English rain. So light yet endless, from a leaden sky! The buildings are lost in the limitless rise. I feel a sense of possibilities, I feel a wrench of hard realities!_

The music carried us through the night, and by the time my parents got home, I was sleeping in my bed and Jake was hidden in my walk-in closet. There was no reason for her to be suspicious as school had ended by that time, and yet I had done everything except go to school that day.

Unfortunately, the day after my time would come as peace ended. As day faded into night in the mid-September snow, I would feel the wrench of hard realities.

** And so there you have it. Its TPoM II Launch Week (that's what its officially going to be called) and you have another chapter of Ignition Point and hopefully a chapter of TPoM II by the end of the week. So make sure that you stay tuned.**

** Some clarifications: the first two lyrics were from Rush's song Witch Hunt, while the last one is from Rush's The Camera Eye. And also, just to clarify, there is no Earth in this story. Just telling you that right now.**

** See you guys later!**


	3. Falling Skies

** Hello once more, faithful readers!**

** I apologize for the really long wait for a new chapter, I got writer's block at the beginning of the week and didn't start really working on the chapter until Wednesday, and even then I didn't work that much. So I'm sorry guys, that was very bad of me. I actually finished on Saturday but I had to have FMF beta, which she did a good job of.**

** So I hope you guys enjoy the first chapter with real action, so I now present Falling Skies. Now, let the story commence!**

**III**

**Falling Skies**

That night I dreamed of the music that I had learned to appreciate so quickly the day before. The sounds of guitars and vocals spread through my ears as my eyes saw nothing but black, but my ears heard so much more. It was some kind of heaven that I was stuck in where I didn't have to worry about school or mobs or people finding out my secret. Everything was safe, and I could just sit here and listen for all of eternity.

All of a sudden, the drums slowly began to grow louder, the heavy beats sounding more like thunder, and it came to the point that each one shook the world around me in a sound wave of epic proportions. It took a second for me to realize that this wasn't part of the music that I was listening to within my dream; this was from my real life.

It only took one more loud explosion for me to sit bolt upright in my bed, scrambling over to the closet and throwing open the door, where Jake lay sleepily. "What are those noises?" he complained, and I grabbed him by the wrist and led him over to the window. I would have told him right away had I had known already, but the rapid reaction was a first for both of us.

Though I could only see the line of backyards that were in a row with us, the destruction was unbelievable. The spruce trees that dominated the backs of houses were in flames, some of the houses were crumbling apart, and swarms of black forms dotted the sky, circling around the city like a scavenger examining its next meal from above. One of the shapes swooped down to a house near us and fired a number of projectiles that glowed blue and others that moved faster with a black and green glow to them, all of them destroying more parts of the house on impact through huge, fiery explosions that shook the ground.

I whipped back around to Jake, who stood with his eyes locked on the beings that flooded the skies around us. "The Withers," he breathed, putting his head in his hands, "They're here."

There was a heavy tension in the air as I seemed to be frozen in position, part of it a heavy dose of fear, and part of it the fact that I was awaiting a real answer from Jake. What he had said was obvious enough, but there was no reason to rush him. I feared that there would be soon, though. The grand masses of the Withers bombed the city from above the treetops, flying amongst the clouds like birds in the sky. To make matters worse, on the streets there droves of black skeleton forms that held swords and destroyed the ruins of houses that the Wither's hadn't been able to obliterate quite as efficiently.

"They must have been able to follow me, finally. I figured that this would have happened much sooner, but thank Notch that you're the last person we need. The Withers must have found the wormhole and have followed me and the others here, which means that a couple things: your entire world as you know it will most likely cease to exist, we aren't going to be able to meet in Emerald City, and we need to move," Jake explained, turning to face me to try and emphasize what he was telling me. "_Now._"

I was about to grab a fresh change of clothes since it looked like I wouldn't be able to come back to my house and salvage anything that I might have left behind when a Wither stopped right outside my frost covered window and stared in at us. "Stop moving," Jake ordered me calmly, and I quickly stopped with my hand wrapped around a red shirt. The stare of the Wither seemed to penetrate through the solid materials solely to stare at me, directly into my soul to try and find out if I was any sort of threat.

The sound of it humming away from my window made me drop the shirt in relief. My triumph was short lived, though, as all of a sudden explosions rang out much closer to my bedroom than they had been before and the room shifted to an angle. Every small part of the walls and ceiling threatened to give way under the heavy pressure of the explosions, and finally the cracks in the floor spread enough that it broke apart like glass, sending the two of us tumbling into a large pile of rubble.

Chunks of stone and wood crumbled around me, and I landed on a dust covered table, rolling over limply onto a large slab of stone brick. I was shrouded in darkness as the destroyed blocks piled up around me, making a small cavern of space that I laid on my back in helplessly. Ashes clogged my mouth as I lay helplessly as my house continued to fall apart around me. A sense of hopelessness overcame every thought in my body, and I tore away at a plank of wood to get some daylight. The beam of white light was welcomed by me, and I continued to throw away the useless articles aside in order to break free.

Soon enough, I had a hole large enough to stick my head through, but the small ceiling above me that gave me about a foot of room was sure to come down with any more pressure or the taking away of its weak supports. Just when I thought I might have to do something overly aggressive in order to get out of the rubble, the entire wall of broken materials that I had been trying to slowly claw my way through burst open as a rush of water sprayed me, soaking my clothes and getting my hair sopping wet. The glint of Jake's eyes was visible in the darkness beyond my trap. "C'mon, Crystal. We've got to get the hell out of here."

Scrambling out of my trap and into the dark cavern that Jake was standing in, I parted the hair that had clung against my forehead and hung annoyingly in front of my eyes. "What was that blast of water into my face for, you jerk?" I exclaimed as I found my balance on a severed block of stone brick. There were fires burning around us, and we seemed to be in some kind of tunnel that had formed because of the imminent destruction that all the Withers had created.

"It was to get you out of there, for your information," Jake replied smugly, as if he enjoyed my anger somehow, "Although I don't know if our present situation is that much better. It almost looks like the ground fell apart underneath your house because of the Withers constantly bombing the ground around you. Seems like your house was built above a ravine."

My eyes swept the large cavern around us. The layer of destruction that acted as a ceiling was broken in many places, which was our main source of light at the moment. That layer appeared to be what was normally the ground at the surface of the world, which meant that we were indeed underground thanks to the attack. "I didn't mean what I said, by the way. Calling you a jerk," I blurted out without realizing it.

Jake looked back at me like I was crazy. "Well, I figured that, anyways," he responded, returning to scouting the ravine. That was it, that was all I got? I rolled my eyes at myself as I remembered exactly what was at stake here. My parents, Willow, really all of the town was either in havoc above ground or in the crumbling masses in the ravine like Jake and I. "It's going to be hard for us to make it back up to the surface. Luckily, it looks like there are tunnels in the side of the ravine," Jake continued, seemingly dropping the last subject. "If we can find a pathway that will take us back up to near the surface layer, then we can get out."

Raising an eyebrow, I looked hopelessly at the numerous cave entrances. The insides of them spiraled in a million different directions, some of them curving to the side and others gently rising upwards, a few of them even opening to drops into darkness. "And how exactly are we supposed to do that?" I questioned him confusedly.

A smile broke out on Jake's face, even considering the hopeless situation that we had found ourselves in. "I suppose that this is a great time for an orientation of sorts, then. When you first discover your special power, you don't have any control over it whatsoever, correct?" he began, and I nodded. "In order to use it as a true ability in fights and whatnot, you have to develop it, and in turn as you grow stronger you learn new powers. We don't have any time for you to properly train yourself in conjuring fire, so we have to move on to the next step. Anything that will help us related to fire, heat, lava, whatever you can think of."

Closing my eyes, I searched my brain for any ideas on what I could do in this situation. Ultimately, I settled on one possible idea: thermal vision. If I could see where the air spaces were in these tunnels, then I could see which one led up to one of the exits of the ravine. "Thermal vision," I thought aloud, turning to Jake to make sure that this was somewhat plausible. He shrugged in response and seemed to think about what that could possibly do for us in this situation, and then continued.

"For you to actually be able to use your ability, you have to first believe that you can. I know that this sounds all psychedelic and stuff, but you have to trust me. Just imagine that you can use infrared for a moment. You can close your eyes if you have to," he explained.

Facing the large ravine wall that seemed to have been worn away over years of erosion, I imagined a fake series of tunnels that ran through the terrain. They sloped all around, following no specific kind of pattern, but instead spiraling in a million different directions that didn't exactly lead to other exits from the series of tunnels. The pockets of airspace were a greenish color, while the solid materials were just a faded black that I could see through. Jake, standing next to me, was a bright red form, which I supposed indicated a living thing.

"Now, open your eyes and really concentrate on that image, that you can use that exact ability in real life," I heard Jake's voice say, and I opened my eyes. My vision returned to normal, but it slowly began darkening again as I stared at the wall in concentration. Jake actually did begin turning a shade of red, and the green tunnels reappeared this time, although they were in much lesser numbers in reality. I hadn't noticed that I had been holding my breath, and I slowly loosened out as the world took a different hue around me.

"Is it working? Something that isn't actually used to harm other entities usually isn't that hard to learn to control," Jake asked, although his form was just a bright red. I looked down at my own hands and found that they were the exact same color.

"I think so," I mumbled, and walked closer to the wall, where there was a large cave entrance that snaked upward towards the top of the ravine. The green trail that represented its path eventually reached another exit that was right under a hole in the ceiling of the ravine. "This is the way," I confirmed, climbing into the tunnel as it rested just above the ground of the ravine. The rubble of houses and streets was replaced by the rugged surfaces of natural stone that had been carved out over many years of wear and tear.

"Now that you know how to use that ability, you can just turn it on or off like the snap of a finger. It usually doesn't take any effort," Jake finished, following me up the small ridge that led into the tunnel.

I glared at him confusedly for a moment. "Usually?" I interrogated.

"As in, if you're under heavy pressure or you're using a particularly hard ability. Like me freezing an entire room as I did before. Surely you haven't forgotten that experience already," Jake replied flatly. "Now c'mon, we need to move."

While we began the trek up the sloping and spiraling tunnel, he took out his smartphone and dialed some numbers into and spoke a little. Once he was done and the phone was safely back in the pocket of his pants, I asked what he had done.

"Well, considering that the Withers are here in your reality and they want to seek us and the others out, we shouldn't be meeting back together in the epicenter of all the battles," he said.

"But how do you know that Emerald City is going to end up being attacked?" I queried in response, "I mean, for all we know, the Withers only followed the two of us here."

"Do you think that they will simply stop here? And besides, there are probably three different groups moving out to take out my accomplices. So no, that's not that good of an idea. So we'll be meeting them in Jungle Junction instead," he contradicted. That was a much better idea, I realized now that I had thought about it. Emerald City would indeed be the perfect place for the Withers to take down any form of government or civilization, that is, if they were intelligent enough to figure that out for themselves. Something inside of me predicted that they were. Jungle Junction, however, was still relatively centered within the land mass that was the Minecraftian Republic, and it wasn't as worthy of being a target. Jungle Junction was a simple town, smaller than Spruce Arbor, that rested on the Treetop Territory side of the Great Lake, which was an effective border between the Frozen Frontier and the former. It had busy traffic paths coming into it from most areas of the country, so it was still somewhat centered. It didn't serve as the main cocoa or wood supplier, though, so it was more of a travel hub.

Overall, it was a good idea that would surely stick pretty well. We were almost to the top of the tunnel when there was the slightest bit of movement around a corner in front of us.

Jake pressed his index finger to his lips and looked around into the dark, where a single zombie stood with its back turned to us. It was grunting awkwardly and in no pattern fashion whatsoever, instead choosing to stand there simply and be annoying by being directly in the path that we needed to pass through. Jake turned back to me and whispered, "Trying using your fire on it. It'll help once we get to the surface."

As if on cue, an explosion from above shook the tunnel, and small pebbles and stones from the ceiling fell down lightly onto the ground and into my hair. I brushed them out habitually and stepped out around the corner, where the zombie was standing there like a sitting duck, waiting for my attack. I swung at the air while concentrating on the thoughts of fire, and a jet of flame shot out of the palm of my hand in the motion that my punch had gone, missing the mob in front of me by a couple feet and just directing its attention to me. I tried again, concentrating more on aim and not a heavy, glamorous swing through the air. This time, the fire leapt from my palms in a concentrated beam of flames, hitting the zombie just as it had begun to make its way towards me to unleash wrath.

Unfortunately for the undead creature before me, that was not to be the case. The flames caught its clothes on fire and charred whatever skin it had left, turning its blackening blood into an effective source of gas so that the flames only grew. Turning off my beam, Jake and I watched in amazement as the poor mob suffocated in smoke. It wasn't long before there was a simple pile of dust and ashes where the zombie had once stood.

"Hopefully the Withers will be that vulnerable to your power," Jake commented before stepping around the remains of the zombie and continuing up into the highest part of the tunnel. I followed him, although I felt a little bit lightheaded after conjuring the fire in a concentrated beam like that. It was obvious that I would have to learn to do that more often if I was to hold my own in the coming fights.

Eventually, we reached the exit of the tunnel that we had been climbing in, which opened up into a straight drop down from the top of the ravine to the rubble below. The gash in the earth seemed to stretch on forever, darkness encompassing anything that resided too far away from our position so that it stayed hidden. Small fires from torchlight rested in spread out positions along the ground, creating an eerie flickering light that barely even stretched up to where we were. Our main source of light was instead the five by five block hole in the ceiling of the dirt and stone ceiling that led up to the surface of Spruce Arbor. It hung just next to the exit of our cave, daring anyone who wanted to get out of the ravine to have to take a dangerous jump over the pit.

Luckily, that wouldn't be a problem for Jake and I, as he conjured a small path made of solid ice that froze against the top of hole and the edge of our tunnel so that we had a stairway of sorts that led up to the surface without the danger of us falling into the blackened abyss underneath. Jake quickly climbed up with ease, while I took a little more time to make sure that I didn't slip over the side accidentally. It didn't take long for me to reach the small ledge at the top, which I climbed over with the help of Jake's support.

The surface of Spruce Arbor was certainly not succumbing well to the Wither attack. The hole that we had just climbed out of appeared to be where a house had once stood, but was now in ruins deep in the cavern below. Houses that were either not resting above the ravine or just lucky enough to not have collapsed into the abyss were in ruins above ground, the remains of walls and roofs in heaps on the ground, with billowing smoke rising up out of the ashes as they burning with a bright flame of destruction.

This was my town. Even though I didn't know how exactly we would be able to defeat the Withers, but there had to be some kind of loophole to how they operated, shooting skulls all around the town in an effort of nothing more than to reduce it to rubble. We were off of the street, although this lot where the two of us were standing wasn't the one that my house and stood on. Along the stone brick street were small groups of black skeletons holding stone swords threateningly, and one of the squads saw us and advanced forward.

"Wither Skeletons, effective minions to serve as a cleanup crew on the ground where some civilians possibly survived the bombings," Jake explained, pointing at the mobs. "Um, Crystal, you might want to ready your fire beams or whatever you want to call them. They're coming right for us, and they don't look friendly."

The two of us stood side by side just a few blocks in front of the ice staircase into the ravine that Jake had constructed, facing the Wither Skeletons as they marched toward us in preparation for an attack. There were merely four of them in the group that had advanced toward us, so I got to focus in on exactly what they looked and sounded like. In fact, they must have simply been some mutated form of skeleton, as the only difference between the two was the fact that the Wither version had solid black bones instead of white ones, like a normal human body.

It didn't take very long for me to have to exit my observation mode as the mobs advanced quickly on us, one of the swinging a stone sword right at me. Dodging easily to my left so that I broke apart from Jake, I once more shot a beam of fire from my palm so that it burned the Wither Skeletons from a safe distance. The red flames danced on the bones of our enemies and seemed to erode the bones, effectively making them weaker. One of them collapsed onto the ground, which was covered in a thin layer of ash and snow, and writhed in pain. The other three were still slowly walking towards me, although it was clear that their strength was dwindling. Since they were all focused on me, this presented the perfect opportunity for Jake to strike.

From behind the helpless mobs, Jake approached with a look of amusement in his eyes, as usual, and stopped about five feet from the dying Wither Skeletons. Seriously, his face always looked like he had just been told a really funny joke. Towns completely being destroyed were no joke, I scolded him from inside my head, although I was sure that he knew that and that it was just the way that he looked.

A blast of cold air followed that as snow completely covered the remaining Wither Skeletons and effectively snuffing out the fires in replace of a freezer burn. The forms slumped over onto the ground lifelessly, and Jake flashed an amused grin in my direction. "And that is how you take care of a problem," he joked, stepping over the smoldering remains of the mobs to reach me so we could plan out our next objective.

With a moment of peace, no matter how brief it might be, Jake and I were able to collect our thoughts on what to do now. We had to reach Jungle Junction as quickly as possible to meet up with the three people from the different realities, but there was the small problem of getting out of Spruce Arbor alive in order to even have a chance of doing that in the first place. And besides, were we supposed to help the other civilians who were being killed because of our presence, or was it too much of a risk? And what about all of my friends and my parents? There had to still be some possible way for me to save them without getting myself killed.

Droves of Withers flocked the sky, racing around the town with dark intentions and a ruthless thirst for the blood of innocent people who resided in the town. Every once in a while a small group of them would dart down from the sky above and completely obliterate a building with the explosive skull projectiles, making it look as if the sky was falling and destroying Spruce Arbor with absolutely no mercy.

"There are probably tons of survivors in the ravine that we fell into, but it would be too much of a project to get back down there and bring them back up. Besides, there are probably numerous ones that are still wandering around the ruins that are above ground," Jake stated.

"I actually have a theory," I interjected, just noticing something notable that we could use to our advantage. "The Withers look like they're solely attacking concentrated areas of mass, like buildings. The Wither Skeletons are simply sent in to kill off the people who scatter throughout the rest of the streets, and they aren't that hard to fight. They're just like a brain-dead zombie who happens to be carrying a sword. So if we were to get a big group of people roaming through the streets, then we could maybe fight off what we could and continue out of the city with a massive group of people that could help us along the way to Jungle Junction."

Jake seemed to consider it for a minute, but his thinking expression quickly became a frown of disappointment. "But that would only make that group a larger mass, so the Withers would more easily be able to pick us off. They can kill us just as easily when we're in twos and threes like now, so why just get together so that we're noticeable. It's a good idea, honest, but it just wouldn't work the way that they're designed to think. Trust me, I was one of the scientists who helped design them as a force against any kind of invasion," he contradicted, greatly darkening our spirits as our situation became more and more hopeless.

There had to be some way to get out of the town with survivors. "Let's just make our way southeast, and if we meet anyone along the way, then they can join aboard the bandwagon," he proposed, and I nodded sadly. It was depressing to admit that we didn't have the time or the energy to try and make a hopeless effort at saving my parents and Willow, but it was the truth, and we had to accept it if we wanted any chance to get out ourselves.

We began trekking along the cracked stone brick street, and I took out my stone sword for another source of protection just in case we encountered some hostile threat. The Withers repeatedly swooped down and obliterated building after building, houses, restaurants, and stores alike. The smell of smoke filled my nostrils, and apparently it was supposed to be disgusting. Because of my unusual relationship with fire, however, I found it to actually invigorate me, giving a similar effect to the kind of effect you would expect out of tea or soda or something of the like.

Our spirits kept deepening as we were denied the gift of other survivors. In fact, the path we had taken not only was completely vacant of other humans, but every building was already crumbled to the ground. We were far from where the ravine had been discovered, so there was no danger in accidentally slipping into some sinkhole of sorts. That would suck, I realized, and realized that there were probably people that had died like that because they had dropped that far without any kind of cushioning, no matter how uncomfortable that cushioning may have been.

Eventually, we reached a building that was standing, although it wasn't in good shape. From the continuous shaking of the ground from the heavy bombings, the sign of the establishment had fallen pathetically to the ground. It read _Spruce Arbor Community Bank_, and I stifled a small laugh. It was ironic how the building that stole people's money basically was the only one still standing in this general area. We had never used a bank because of the prospect of them possibly loaning your money to other people and then not being able to give it back to you when you especially needed it.

Something clicked inside of my mind on why this building was still standing. Within the decorative layer of spruce wood that made the outside of the large building, there was another layered wall, floor, and ceiling of obsidian, and then another of wood on the inside to look make it look presentable. This was so that the bank couldn't be set on fire from the outside, especially burning everyone's credits. The idea was so that you didn't lose your money that way. (Besides, they took care of themselves, anyways.) But my point was that obsidian was virtually indestructible, and I turned to Jake for a confirmation as to why the bank was still standing.

"I'm guessing the bank is mainly made of obsidian, correct?" he asked, practically stealing the words right out from under my tongue. "Obsidian should be able to hold with some support, but after continuous attacks it will fall. I'd say it has about ten bombing runs before it collapses." The two of us turned back to the building, which shined like a diamond amongst the rough. Figuratively, though, as it had obviously withstood at least one bombing run already. The outer layer of wood was severely damaged in some places, bravely showing off the rugged purplish rock that made up the frame of the building.

"Let's go inside and see if anyone is taking refuge in there," I suggested, taking a quickly scan of the skies around us to make sure that no Withers were coming in at that moment for a bombing run. Even if they had been, I wouldn't have been able to tell anyways, since their strategy involved suddenly swooping down and obliterating everything.

Once I pushed open the soot covered metal door into the bank, it turned out that there were a lot of other people who had had the exact same idea as us. The lobby of the bank contained a bunch of people covered in ash and tattered clothing, looking as if they had just arrived to this bank from hell. In a way, using it as an expression, of course, they in fact had.

The actual inside of the bank would have been considered neat and prettily designed had masses of people not been taking refuge inside of it. Each wooden wall was sparkling as if they were washed thoroughly every day from top to bottom, and the few places where the floor wasn't occupied by human feet was a neat oak color, imported from the Sky Straits' scarce reservation forests. There had been a lot of oak trees in the Frozen Frontier before, but the weather wasn't as well suited toward their species, and instead the spruce trees had dominated the sunlight and the snow that melted into water as resources.

Along the back wall was a row of small terminals where the tellers would stand behind and deposit or withdraw your money for the bank to keep. Through the glass windows were the large iron vault doors that led into the actual vaults where tons of emeralds and money was stored. If a civilian were to even open one of those doors without permission, they would be sentenced to months in jail. Ironic how it could be that secure when the fact that all of the money was there in the first place was a crime, the way the banks used it.

Apparently that wouldn't exactly be the case in this particular situation, considering the droves of people who were hopelessly trapped within this building if they didn't want to traverse across the battlefield that the large city had now become. Some explosions went off in the distance, cuing chills in my spine to snake upward toward my skull eerily. The fact that my parents or Willow might still be out there somewhere trying to desperately get to safety, already in a building like this bank, or the unthinkable… it all worried me as to what my life was becoming. Someone naïve enough would simply blame Jake for bringing them here, but it wasn't necessarily his fault. He had only come here to get me.

Quickly, Jake and I realized that the people who had come to seek refuge in the bank were in no shape to continue fighting through the rest of the city to try and break into the outskirts, where there were likely less Withers attacking. No, these people had come to this bank to simply delay what were surely their final hours, not to group up with others in order to fight their way out the old fashioned way. I bit my lip in nervousness. Our situation was becoming more and more hopeless.

A man walked over from one of the teller's booths, wearing a frayed suit and ripped dress pants that were surely not his preferred combat attire. "Welcome, you two, to Spruce Arbor Community Bank, now temporarily giving away free refuge from the imminent attack from, er, do either of you know what they are exactly?" he questioned nervously.

"No, we don't," Jake responded quickly, tapping me on the leg with his shoe. Oh, right, if other people knew that we knew what the Withers were then they would suspect of us something. It was better to play it safe.

"And, were you seriously just trying to advertise to us in the midst of what might be a national crisis?" I accused, folding my arms and staring at the man threateningly.

He slowly shrank away, muttering something about great service, and soon enough Jake and I were alone within our five feet perimeter. "What exactly are we supposed to do now, presuming that none of these people want to join us?" I queried to Jake as soon as the bank employee had walked back to some other unsuspecting group of survivors. "I mean, that doesn't look like it's the case, so what's the point of even looking?"

Jake could give no immediate except for a long face, effectively making my grim spirits even worse. If he didn't know what to do, then there was practically no hope for getting out of the city in one piece. Luckily, though, he had a suggestion that actually meant something to me. "Well, before we leave this building, we should make sure that neither your parents or friends are still trapped here. That way we aren't making a hopeless search for them throughout the city on our way southwest," he explained.

In truth, it was a good idea at the heart for a person to say, but it also depressed me on a lower level of my conscience. If I found one of my parents, then that would almost certainly mean that the other was dead, as they wouldn't have come without each other, and if I found just Willow then I would somehow wish it was my parents instead. And if I didn't find any of them, then that would almost certainly freak me out.

But we had to look for them, it was the only morally ethical thing to do. Backing off wouldn't help at all, even if it meant the two of us got out of the city alive.

Throwing aside any further subconscious protest from inside my head, I nodded in agreement and began walking throughout the room, looking for any flash or quick instance of Willow or my parents, praying to Notch that there would be. But after five minutes of looking with Jake at my side since he didn't have an accurate description of what they looked like to actual scour the room himself, there was no sign of either party. In fact, I didn't even recognize anyone inside the bank, probably because we had already moved so far through the city that my neighborhoods were left far behind. If we had been able to find my parents or my friends in a building, then this was not it. And the one where we possibly could find them was so far back that there was absolutely no point in turning around with the threat of the Withers still imminent.

Speaking of the Withers, it was at that moment that they chose to make another bombing run on the bank that we were hiding in. The force of the skulls smashing against the obsidian shook the ground around us, and small pieces of dust and wood chips fell down from the ceiling onto the shoulders of unsuspecting refugees, further darkening the attitude of everyone in the room. There seemed to be no way out of this hellhole.

Once the explosions stopped hitting our building, which took about thirty seconds, Jake grabbed my arm in a tight grip and led me out of the building into the war torn streets. Much more of the wood outside of the building had been blown apart now, resting in small tattered heaps on the ground around the bank as pathetically as the sign that now rested face down in the muddy grass next to the door into the building.

The sounds of distant houses being blown to ashes threatened to deaf my ears, and Jake had to shout over the noise. "We have to go now, take the opportunity when the Withers certainly won't attack the same building again within a minute!" he yelled, and he continued on to say another sentence that was lost in the volume of other noise. The message was pretty clear, though, as he turned to run in the direction that we had been going before we stopped at the bank. _Follow me._

We eventually came across another group of Wither Skeletons, and I blasted through them with plumes of fire, wielding them as a weapon now and growing more confident in my ability. To think that yesterday morning all I had known to use them for was a reading light and to melt away ice that was on the path in front of my house now seemed unthinkable. At this point, I was making the bodies of hostile mobs literally disintegrate at my command thanks to the hot flames licking their bones and then enveloping them in embers.

It wasn't long before the patrol was either burnt into cinders on the ground or frozen in blocks of fatal ice that sat at awkward angles within the ground. The two of us continued running past them in a frenzy to get away from the mayhem of Spruce Arbor, abandoning the ruins of the city, leaving my friends and family behind, seeking out whatever friends that Jake had brought to my reality to finish what they had started…

Leaving the smoldering remains of the squad of Wither Skeletons behind, Jake and I hurried our way through the apocalyptic remains of the city. It was eerily amazing that the destruction had been taken to such a devastating level, with every single house overturned onto its side or the roof fallen in as if it had just been crushed by a giant. The force of each explosion was that of three charged creepers, it seemed, as the skulls slammed into buildings off in the distance with great force, shattering entire houses or restaurants on impact.

Holes in the ground had begun to open up as if creepers actually were simply blowing up on the ground at the sight of any human. The real cause of these were stray skull projectiles that missed their targets and instead hit the streets or the lawns of other houses, effectively creating a rugged terrain that was becoming extremely hard to navigate, as if we were actually venturing through the wild. This was what we would soon be doing, but it felt odd to be in an urban jungle. Oh yeah, and it was also being bombed from the skies by the Withers.

The two of us continuously took out more patrols of Wither Skeletons, rarely seeing a group of Withers fly overhead as they came down to destroy another building. Even worse was the fact that there were no other survivors on the streets of the city that we could find, always heading southwest so that we could get out into the wild where the Withers weren't residing.

The sky was now blotted out by ash and smoke from buildings throughout the city, and we frequently saw fires rising out of piles of rubble. There were no sinkholes anymore, for we had long passed where the ravine apparently was under the city. Too bad that the government had never known about it, because it would've generated a lot of revenue for a city otherwise funded mainly by supplying lumber.

We were merely five blocks away from the city limits when we reached another bank of the same company, and a Wither bombing run commenced on it when we were within only a couple of blocks of it. The obsidian split apart, obviously having held many strikes over the past hour or two, conjuring a large cloud of smoke that rushed over Jake and I. I shot a beam of fire up into the air to try and hit one of the Withers, but was apparently unsuccessful because there was no cry of pain or anything of the sort from above.

Once the dust cleared, a group of four other people emerged from the rubble of the now collapsed building. There had either been very few people taking refuge in this bank because of its location, or everyone else had just been crushed in the attack. The all held swords except for one girl, who held a bow and arrow and looked vaguely familiar. Before I could get a good look at her, however, a large mass of Wither Skeletons advanced toward us, and we buckled down for the fight. I sprayed fire in front of me while Jake blasted waves of freezing cold water at them, instantly melting the snow on the ground and replacing it with ice that caused some of the hostiles to slip and fall over on their backs amusingly. It would have been funny had the situation not been what it was at the moment.

Survivors from the bank wielded their swords and slashed apart the Wither Skeletons while they were down, writhing in pain from my embers or simply slipping around without proper footing because of Jake's ice. The two of us made an effective combo, and the others made the cleanup work look easy as they slashed apart the black bones of the Wither Skeletons with iron blades, the one person firing flint arrows that stuck into the skulls of the enemies.

One of the survivors, a man in his forties with graying hair and a rusty iron sword, made the final blow to the last of the Wither Skeletons, chopping through the clavicle as if it were butter to render that particular enemy completely useless. In the short moment of elation, I relaxed my shoulders as my fire was no longer needed at the moment, and I didn't see the five black forms descending toward us. Luckily, Jake did, and quickly summoned a dome of strong ice to completely cover the five of us, excluding the archer who had stayed behind in order to get a better shot at the enemies we had been fighting. The Withers descended from above and shot their skulls at us with great power, cracking the dome in many places. It held, though, although out of the corner of my eye I could see beads of sweat appearing on Jake's forehead as he struggled to keep it strong enough to protect us.

However strong our dome was, it wasn't large enough to save the other girl from total annihilation. The explosions shook the ground around us and knocked her to the ground, and one of the skull projectiles slammed into the ground mere feet away from her body. The green, fiery explosion encompassed her, and I pressed my fingers to the ice barrier while watching through it as if it were glass. The attack from the Withers stopped, and all I saw was the lifeless body of the girl. Her eyes stared at us blankly, navy blue and all too familiar. Black hair that had previously been down to her neck was now singed in many places, making her almost unrecognizable. Jake realized the magnitude of what had just happened and made the ice dome quickly melt without water like it had before in the principal's office the previous morning.

As soon as it evaporated, I sprinted quickly over to the girl's body, asking myself a million questions including how could I have saved her, why hadn't Jake made the dome bigger, and why the hell she was even this far out in the city anyways? The lifeless blue eyes seemed to stare at me accusingly, and I dropped my head into the white nightgown that had many tears in it now, sobbing like my best friend had just died in my arms.

That was because she had.


	4. The Road to Nowhere

** Hello once more, faithful readers!**

** I bring you all a snazzy chapter full of more action to pile on top of the last one, a short memorial for Willow, a South Park reference, and much more. And that's just in the first five paragraphs! XD**

** Seriously, though, I do have some important things to say. Most importantly, the Original Character contest is over as I have picked all three winners at this point. The first one is none other than FullMoonFlygon with her character Lukas Noah, and he will be briefly mentioned in this chapter as a plot element. The other two won't be announced until the release of chapter five, but beware: I **_**have **_**picked out those winners, so stop submitting.**

** I don't know if any of you other guys have a PS3, but mine is making me very angry. Obviously I'm posting this before school in my time zone, but yesterday the Revolution DLC for Black Ops 2 came out. I know you guys have mixed feelings about CoD and if you don't like it then you can skip this paragraph. :P So by the time I get home from school to download it, PSN Store is going under maintenance. And so I'm playing around, about to prestige for the fourth time, and suddenly it connects to PSN Store! So I start downloading Revolution, and I'm sitting playing Clash of Clans watching my TV anxiously because OMGOMGDIERISEMUSTPLAYOMGOMG And then my mom calls me upstairs for dinner and tells me that's enough video games for the night. #TROLOLOLOL**

** I tell you all this slightly amusing anecdote from yesterday because I haven't really talked to you all through the author's note, so if you aren't really one of my good friends on the site I don't know you as well. So, I have a question for you guys! What other times have your gaming experiences made you very, very angry? Should be funny. XD**

** And now, let the story commence!**

**IV**

**The Road to Nowhere**

All of the ash that drifted through the air clouded the sky like fog, burning my skin like acid rain. The kind of burn that it inflicted was unlike the fire that I was now able to conjure, but rather a chemical directly scarring my body. For now, however, I could care less if my arms were roasted by the time I had finished collecting myself. Willow laid in my arms, her lips unmoving and eyes closed with a certain dark shadow cast over them. It was nothing more than me, kneeling on the torn up ground that was covered in the thin layer of snow we had grown accustomed to over the years, frolicking in it when we were young and working in it and with it at older ages like now. And those bastards had taken it all away from her.

Willow was truly dead. At this point that was one of the most obvious facts that you could take from this situation. Her chest had risen and fallen for the last time twenty seconds ago now, and I made sure that her eyes were shut tightly to make sure that her soul didn't see the horrors of what had happened here as she rose up to the Aether. Surely she had led a good life, or at least she had when she was in my company. There was no way to tell what she had done in secrecy, but she was so innocent. Why did the Withers have to take her?

"Oh my Notch, they killed Willow!" one of the other survivors exclaimed, as if just overcoming the shock and realizing what had happened. "You bastards!" The man cried out to the sky in anguish, speaking directly to the Withers who had taken her innocent life. The man was Willow's father, now that I realized when looking at him. He was the man who had taken out the last Wither Skeleton in our last battle, with graying hair and sunken eyes. It was ironic how he looked like one of the undead himself in his current state.

"Crystal, we have to get out of the city right now if you want any chance to stay alive!" Jake shouted from behind me, and a sob racked my body. There was no time to give Willow a proper burial, but instead the only way out was to sprint away through the few blocks left that we had to traverse in order to reach the city limits. Willow would be left here without me and without a proper goodbye. The fact that Jake was right was the saddest thing; we didn't have much time.

"Crystal?" the man who I had identified as Willow's father sputtered, walking closer to me and his daughter's limp body. "Crystal Flakko, is that you?"

Closing my eyes and praying that he would accept my answer, I stood up. "I have to go, I think I know how to stop all of this. The bombings, the destruction, the deaths, everything. Just make sure that she isn't forgotten," I told him boldly, laying Willow down on the snowy ground and turning back to Jake. "Let's get going."

The three survivors behind had their eyes dead set on our backs as we walked away through the wreckage of the outskirts of town, the Wither bombings still making their marks deep in the center of the city. We definitely did look like two freaks, using supernatural abilities only the mobs themselves would be thought of to use as weaponry while they wielded swords. "She'll be our martyr. We won't forget her," her father's voice called after me, piercing through the air and stopping me in my tracks. Were my parents martyrs as well?

After all, it didn't look like Jake and I would be finding them anytime soon, so I would technically classify them as martyrs. Most of the town's population would count as martyrs based on this logic. Each life meant just as much to someone as the next one to another. It wasn't a matter of who was more important and why, but rather that we were all staying in this fight together. We couldn't have humans tearing each other apart emotionally and then have the meek power to stay as a union.

"C'mon, who knows when the Withers will advance their attack on any survivors of the wreckage that spread across the city," Jake warned me one again, and I waved another short goodbye to Willow. I was sure that she could hear me, wherever she happened to be residing after death.

We needed a game plan once we reached the city limits, and for now it was simply to continue toward Jungle Junction. The odds weren't in our favor that we would make it that far out of the city. The Withers that circled overhead in the distance would be moving on to try and hunt the two of us down in due time. Anyways, the wild itself was dangerous without a supernatural enemy chasing you down. At day it was reasonably safe, but if you were caught on the trail in the middle of night by a pack of mobs, it would become very dangerous.

Everything that I loved had literally just been stripped away in less than two hours. The Withers had killed Willow, my parents were lost in the wreckage that piled high around the city, and every memory of school or other friends would never be replicated again. There was no more high school, no more sporting events, no more parties. Just the acrid smell of death that threatened to knock me out with its grotesqueness. Only the smoke that wafted through the air gave me any sense of safety, and that came at the price of wood burning.

Throughout the last four or five blocks of our trek there were no more banks, and therefore no other survivors. Where the road branched into a toll a railroad started that followed the road adjacent to its left. The toll itself was heavily damaged, the turnstiles for people walking rusted and covered with soot. One part of the roof of the security checkpoint building that stood at the right of the road had been blasted completely off, lying in a fiery heap at the side of the building.

Jake followed me inside the train terminal building on the left of the road that led to the minecart tracks. It was much to my dismay, however, when all the train times to other cities had been cancelled according to a graphic on the wall with most of the cities in the Minecraftian Republic listed, the time the train was supposed to be departing or arriving from this specific Spruce Arbor station, and then in all caps red letters the word 'CANCELLED'.

"Did you seriously expect the trains to still be operating?" Jake questioned me as I kicked a metal bench for people waiting for a train, angry at my increasing bad luck.

"No, but I have to check everything. Do you want to get out of the city or not?" I spat back at him, my blood beginning to boil again. He seriously didn't understand the mystery that I had been thrown into. I had been leading a perfect simple life and then he stepped in, bringing me to realizing my fire abilities and bringing death and destruction from the Withers with him. I'm sure that the other three people that he had recruited had experienced the same problems when he first arrived in their realities.

However, Jake had a way of disproving my suspicions about him within seconds. As the two of us looked angrily at the train schedules, he spoke up in an apologetic tone of voice. "Look, I know that you don't understand a lot of what is going on, and I'm sorry that I'm being harsh at some points. But Crystal, we need to move out of the city if we want to exit the city."

"And how exactly will we do that if there aren't any more trains moving between the different cities?" I contradicted, folding my arms as I stared at him now, expecting an answer that actually made sense unlike all of the ones that I had been told today.

Jake stared back at me, the answer as obvious as it was terrifying. "We're going to have to go through the Wild, Crystal. I'm sorry, but it's the only way that we can move on without reactivating the train tracks, and that would take forever to do," he apologized. The Wild was the common name for any area between the major cities, and like I said before, it was really dangerous. There were many areas of the Wild that were used for industry, plants and facilities that dedicated themselves to the specific biome's main industry. For the Frozen Frontier, this referred to the manufacturing and shipment of wood products, which were arguably the most important because of its massive use around the country. Deforesting issues had been addressed thanks to bonemeal, and there were virtually no problems with the Frozen Frontier's economics.

Other than those scarce populated areas of the Wild, however, the danger was imminent at every minute of the day. If it wasn't hostile mobs then it was the danger of finding a cliff edge that served as a fifty meter drop to the ground, and instant death without any armor. There were also nomads, people who decided to live separate from society and in their own homes throughout the Wild. Most of them liked to keep to themselves if you stuck to the paths or train tracks, but stray off into the forest and they would jump you, steal all of your materials, and either leave you stranded with no hope of survival or just kill you on the spot. Nomads were almost a different species, living without rules and relentless to other people if they even stepped within their supposed territory.

I led Jake back out of the train terminal outside, where a light snow had begun to fall again. It piled up on top of the small fire by the security checkpoint on the other side of the tolls, snuffing out the embers and effectively making a pretty white powder to blanket the ground. White puffy clouds dominated the sky now, the Withers effectively flying above it so that the hopeless citizens of Spruce Arbor would have no idea when the abominations moved on from the city's skies to follow Jake and I. An early snow had always meant problems for the Frozen Frontier, but this time it was a beneficiary advantage to the attacking Withers.

Climbing over a broken turnstile, I officially entered the Wild, standing on the cobblestone path that led southwest towards Jungle Junction and Ice Alcove, another city in the Frozen Frontier that was set against the frozen sea on the western part of the district. At some point the path through the Wild would split into three different paths, one leading to Emerald City, one leading to Jungle Junction, and one leading to Ice Alcove. According to Jake he had originally been planning on taking the first path, but the Withers catching up to him had obviously disrupted his perfect plans.

"Have you ever left Spruce Arbor before?" Jake asked me casually once he had made his way over the same broken turnstile. "For any reason at all?"

Shaking my head, I began walking along the cobblestone path. The dangers of the Wild seemed to whisper to me from the towering spruce trees on the left of the abandoned minecart tracks and to the right of the path we actually walked along. "We were always told that it was much too dangerous to go out casually, and that only people on official business every really traversed throughout it. People like mayors, or bands touring the country to play shows. A simple girl in high school would have no reason to venture beyond the city limits," I explained to him, feeling sort of left out that he had led a much more exciting life back in his reality. "What about you? With your advanced technology and all, I'm sure you could traverse the country."

Jake broke a smile, scratching the back of his neck while remembering the world that he had left behind. "Instead of paths, or even minecarts, we had bullet trains. They're crazily fast, you just wind them up and watch them go," he told me, shooting his hand out in front of him. "They run on magnetic energy, actually floating up above the tracks and locked into position using magnetic fields."

The concept sounded amazing, but of course there was a catch that I didn't understand what he was talking about. "What exactly is a magnet?" I queried.

"It's basically a special kind of iron that is charged either negatively or positively, and they correspond to each other in different ways. Two of the same charge will push away from each other, and when forced together can cause one of the objects to move very fast while locked into that force. That's basically how bullet trains work. When two objects of opposite charges come together, they snap together and take a little bit of force to pull them apart, as if they were stuck together with a very thin adhesive," he lectured as we walked along the cobblestone path at a steady pace in the cold early morning hours.

While we walked, I conjured fire to burn in front of us, effectively melting the snow to make a clear path for the two of us to continue on. It was a small flame, like I would use to melt the ice on the path in front of my house for so many years. That path was rubble now, though, crushed and scattered throughout the ravine under Spruce Arbor. That road had been taken and worn out, destroyed due to these attacks. Jake led me along the road to nowhere, seemingly no plan in sight except for the ever stretching clearing of snowy ground and minecart tracks between the tall spruce trees.

"Why don't we stop to eat," Jake suggested after a while, and I nodded in agreement and cleared an area of the cobblestone for us to sit down on, taking time to melt away the ice crystals that had lodged themselves between the cracks of the pieces of stone. Once I finished, the two of us sat with our legs folded in the middle of the road. Normally this would have been a strange sight, but in the wake of this national crisis it didn't make all that much of a difference. Jake took out some cooked pork from his own inventory, handing me a piece between two pieces of bread, and I took a small bite of the food. The bread was a little stale, and the pork was really dry, but Jake had a lot of both plus a few apples and three bowls of mushroom stew. I felt bad that I didn't have any food with me because I had been caught by surprise when my house had been blasted apart, but it wasn't really my fault.

As we ate, I thought of some things that I needed to do once we reached Jungle Junction. The memory of the red shirt I had tried to grab this morning came back to me, the one that had flown out of my grip as my house was overturned by the Withers. I would need some new clothes, as I was still wearing the same ones that I had put on the morning before. We would also want to stock up on supplies, which I would have done had we not had to leave Spruce Arbor in such a hurry.

The snow stopped falling midway through our short meal, the clouds parting to expose a blue sky and then passing back over. At least we would have a small window in the air to see the Withers, just in case they began following us. Still, the abominations had a heavy advantage over everyone on the ground as long as we stayed in the area of the district that was having all the snowy weather. We had been walking for about an hour and a half before we stopped to eat breakfast, so we should have been close to that part of the district.

Still, there was no sign of the minecarts working at all. Even if the trains had been cancelled, the powered tracks that boosted the minecarts every once in a while would have been activated so they glowed red, and instead they all were a dark gray. The more discouraging signs there were along this trek, the worse my hope of survival became, and I began to doubt Jake's ability to get us out of this mess without dying in the process. At the moment, that seemed very plausible, even considering our special abilities.

Once we finished the sandwiches, we stood up and wiped the crumbs off of our shirts and continued along the snow covered path in silence. There was a mutual agreement that neither of us wanted to talk right now, and I was completely fine with keeping the peace. There was no point in disturbing what was working fine for both of us, or to put it in a more cliché way, there was no need to fix what wasn't broken. That ended quickly, however, as Jake's smartphone rang in his pocket and he picked it out and activated the call. "What is it, we're nearing the split between Jungle Junction, Emerald City, and Ice Alcove," Jake said quickly, stopping in his tracks as there obviously was something wrong. "Where are you?"

There was some speaking from the other side of the phone. "Why are you- Crap, Lukas, we're coming. Tell the others to hold out in Jungle Junction if they reach the town. Yeah. We're coming, stay frosty," Jake responded with pauses in between each sentence as he let the other person on the line, supposedly named Lukas, speak back to him. Jake turned to me with wild eyes. "We need to go to Ice Alcove as fast as possible."

"But that's way off course!" I exclaimed, knowing that there was a really important reason for this huge detour.

"I know," Jake replied, turning back to the path in front of us. "If we make a break for it, we can be there in as little as thirty minutes. We have a very unique situation on our hands."

The air around Lukas Noah crackled with electricity as his fear built up. He wasn't made to hide, he was made to run, but this was truly unlike anything else he had ever experienced before. He was standing in the wine cellar of a relatively large house in the suburbs of Ice Alcove, which in this reality was nothing but a big city that had a bay frozen over with ice. Back in his reality, it had been the Frozen Frontier's main navy base. It was stocked full of large ships that were ready to sail off for the Treetop Territory at any second did the tensions between the four countries reach a climax, a full-scale attack waiting for the order to commence.

Lukas, a fifteen year old with lightly tanned skin, was from a reality where the Overworld War had never commenced, and instead history had taken a very different course in the past seventy years than in Crystal's base reality. The four would-be districts of the Minecraftian Republic were separate countries, all of them in heavy tension with each other as war threatened to break out. Thus became a reality where the cities each operated as something to do with helping the military. Emerald City remained split between the four countries, the area of it having been mashed together as the capital once the Great Peace was restored after the war.

As an individual, Lukas wasn't quite built for that world. He was relatively friendly, and stayed secluded to himself and his small clique of friends, not really interested in the political tensions at all like most of the kids were. At eighteen people were required to get a job that would help their country in the military effort. While most of the kids were busy speculating what they would grow up to be when they were older, Lukas was concerned about spending time with his friends. Through that, he had become a very friendly person, even to those that saw him as immature for not caring about the war that never seemed to begin. He saw them in a light even though they made fun of him behind his back, although he could have been popular if he tried. He had the personality, and he certainly had the looks. His short brown hair that stood up a little unnaturally in the back complimented his dark blue eyes, which could make anyone who looked directly into them feel a little uneasy. They had a kind of shocking quality to them.

In truth, Lukas himself had a that 'shocking' quality to him because of his control over electricity. Like Crystal and Jake, he had kept it a secret for all his life, experimenting with his electrical powers in private by creating his own electromagnetic fields, which were unknown in his reality prior to this. This was why he had been able to understand a lot of what Jake was talking about once he arrived from his own reality, all the details of their heavy technological advancements to benefit humanity, and of course the mistake of creating the Withers.

Jake had arrived in the Rocky Ravine, the city where Lukas had lived, just two days after portaling into this reality. The Rocky Ravine was a city in the south of the Sky Straits, built suspended over and on the sides of a giant ravine. Lukas was the first of the three people to join Jake's group prior to Crystal, and it happened in quite a different fashion than the others. Jake had stumbled into the town one night, and made his way through the streets, looking for someone or something desperately. The police of the town had almost filed orders to arrest him for being out way after curfew, but Lukas allowed him inside his house to stay the night once he passed by his house as an act of kindness.

That act of kindness had greatly paid off. Lukas had caught Jake toying around with his smartphone, and had been forced to explain who he was and where he came from. Lukas was immediately convinced, and revealed his own powers. The two of them set out that night, leaving the town and all of Lukas' friends to go back to the portal that would lead to the next reality with a person with these special powers. It had gone perfectly for both of them, setting out with clothes, preferably his black hoodie and faded blue jeans with black tennis shoes, and his favorite iron dagger that he had used as a weapon alternative to his electric powers. Eventually, he had found a way to infuse the knife with an electric rating of sorts, causing it to actually shock its targets on impact. He had only tested it on normal hostile mobs before, as the Withers hadn't caught back up to Jake in any of the realities they had traversed through.

Now, of course, in the base reality that needed to stay compact, they had run into trouble. Splitting up between the four districts of a world where they had joined together as one country, Lukas had been sent to look throughout the Treetop Territory. The district was full of lush rainforests that stretched far up from the ground, creating tight corners in the shade where hostile mobs could stay hostile and very much alive through the day. There was no exception to the paths that cut through the underbrush, a lot of the time elevated, that crossed between cities.

The problem that Lukas had run into was the fact that so many of the nation's nomads resided in the Treetop Territory because of its abundant wood resources that they had formed some of the largest gangs in the Wild, constantly scouting the paths to look for the right time to jump out from the shadows and unleash hell on whatever party was passing through their territory at the moment. Once he received the call from Jake that he had found Crystal and was planning on meeting the others in Jungle Junction, a large group of nomads had assaulted him in the jungle. Due to his overwhelming powers he had been able to get away without killing a lot of them and leaving himself virtually unscathed, but the gang had chased him through the jungle.

Forced to take a route around the Great Lake and therefore passing Jungle Junction and moving into the Frost Frontier overnight, Lukas continued to evade the gangs, effectively taking a detour through the snowy forests of the Wild and arriving at Ice Alcove. The gangs had lost him at that point, but his problems had now become worse. The Withers arrived.

Due to Ice Alcove's higher population, the chaos in that city during the Wither attack was playing out much larger than it had in Spruce Arbor. Lukas had taken shelter in a large mansion of sorts, huddled in the wine cellar and waiting for the attack to close to an end. At this point he had been trapped in the room for fifteen minutes, and had called Jake five minutes ago. His knife clenched tightly in his fist, he awaited any sign that the bombings might have stopped, but they had only just begun. As an individual he didn't know how long they usually lasted, but it would take a while before they stopped.

According to Jake, the last addition to their team was a sixteen year old girl, Crystal Flakko. She had control over fire, and assumingly heat as well as she had already discovered a sort of thermal vision. Lukas guessed that there would be many more powers coming soon, probably stuff to do with lava or other forms of fire. She would most likely charge some weapon with the energy that she produced, just like Lukas had with his electricity. A sword charged with fire… There was an enchantment for that, but it solely caused the entity it struck to catch fire, and it was very rare. An actual sword infused with fire would be much more powerful.

Besides his knife, Lukas had some very useful powers, and had been given a lot of time to develop them over the course of his quest with Jake through four different realities now. His control over electricity allowed him to shock enemies, effectively slowing down their bloodstreams and nerve systems so that their vision, hearing, and conscience were temporarily impaired. This opened the way for a lightning strike, one of his more powerful abilities, where he would literally call down lightning from clouds that blasted apart hostile mobs. Most importantly, though, Lukas could bend the electrical currents in the air around him, allowing him to fly as if he were a bat soaring through the sky.

Unfortunately, none of these abilities had a massive enough impact that it would harm the Withers greatly enough as a whole or allow him to escape the city at the moment. For now, Lukas was hopelessly trapped in the wine cellar of Ice Alcove, awaiting a rescue that might not ever come. He was sure that it would, though. Jake hadn't failed him yet, and it was unlikely that he ever would, especially when everyone's life was on the line.

Derek pushed the tree branch out of his way, moving it aside with force as if it were annoying him. In truth, it was in the wrong place at the wrong time, no reason greater than that. Normally he would have swung his axe at the branch and taken it as a resource, but he didn't feel like it right now. He was ticked off, and it annoyed him to the point that he didn't care about resources that slapped him in the face.

He was part of a group of nomads that lived in the Wild of the Frozen Frontier, near the crossroads that split between Emerald City, Jungle Junction, Ice Alcove, and of course Spruce Arbor. There were seventeen people in his gang, effectively a medium sized group of nomads. It was nothing compared to some of the gangs in the Treetop Territory, but it didn't matter. They got along together finely, convoys of resources often passed near them at the intersection, and their camp within the Wild was effectively hidden.

At least, there normally wasn't any tension throughout the group. Derek was the only one who had seen the Withers passing overhead the day before, heading north toward Spruce Arbor and not even bothering to attack their camp. Derek didn't know what they were, obviously, which created even more fear for him.

Unfortunately, nobody believed his stories about them, and completely disregarded the absurd idea that some new hostile mob was flying through the skies. Even worse, on the back of each of the Withers were three black skeletons wielding a stone sword, making a solid army that would be a very legitimate threat had they decided to stop at a small community like the one that Derek resided in. He had been called a liar repeatedly, and was beginning to angrily resent the others for not believing him when the threat was very real and potentially very dangerous.

Now, Derek was making his way through the snowy path through the trees that was regularly used to check the intersection of paths for any convoys passing through. He finally pushed the branches out of the way and crouched down on the edge of the snowy path, scouting to make sure that if there had been any convoy here, he picked up on their tracks.

On the right side of the path to Spruce Arbor, a pair of footprints proceeded to cut to the west toward Ice Alcove. Derek moved forward toward the pair of tracks, looking at them with inspection. The minecarts dipped down underground at the intersection and popped back up fifty meters in each direction, effectively creating room for the walking paths to move in each direction. The snow on the ground provided the basis for footprints, which was why the gang was more easily able to jump convoys during the winter because of an easier way to track them.

These footprints were a perfect example, and the first of which came during this year's winter. The first snow of the year had only been two nights ago, and it had already paid off. These footprints were distinct, with the snow being crunched down and a lot of it being pushed up behind the shoe's shape. Whoever had made these tracks were in a hurry, running toward Ice Alcove at a speed that a convoy wouldn't.

Even if it wasn't a company exporting supplies, it was still a source of food, weapons, armor, and who knew what else. Derek turned back around quickly, sprinting back through the forest to alert the others of what he had found. Just because they didn't believe him about the Withers didn't mean that they wouldn't believe him concerning potential people to kill and steal from. They would have to get going immediately if they were to catch them, though.

The cold wind whipped in my face as I followed Jake along the snowy path. The minecart tracks had risen back up to the surface now, built up next to the cobblestone path that cut through the Wild. Obviously it wasn't operational, so I assumed that either the nation had completely shut down the tracks as a precaution thanks to the Wither attacks, or Ice Alcove was being attacked. Using my better judgment thanks to the call from this Lukas guy, I assumed that the latter was true, and the adrenaline pumped through my blood even faster as our footprints pounded against the packed snow.

I had given up melting the snow in front of me back after the call had come into Jake's smartphone, completely throwing our objectives off course. We were less than fifteen minutes away from Ice Alcove at a sprinting speed when the arrow flew past my back.

The flint arrowhead whizzed way to close for comfort on the small of my back, barely missing my sweatshirt. As soon as I felt it I stopped and turned to the north, which was the direction from which it had come. My hands lit fire while I scanned the trees, waiting for our attackers. It was either a skeleton or another human, as neither of the species of Wither carried bows and arrows, at least that we knew of. Indeed, the arrow was embedded in the snow on the other side of the road, the wooden rod and feathers at the back sticking up in the air.

"Is that all you have?" a male voice shouted from the forest gloatingly. A man stepped out of the shadows from under the spruce trees, carrying an iron sword and wearing a breastplate and helmet made of the silver metal. "Two torches as weapons? You two definitely aren't transporting anything valuable, but maybe we'll kill you anyways."

Along the tree line stepped out another fifteen people dressed similar to him, wearing tattered clothing and armor while carrying deadly looking weapons. It was one of the gangs that resided in the Wild, and we had stepped into their territory. The man at the front of the pack was standing next to a younger man who held a bow, the bowstring empty.

"I'm not sure that you want to pick a fight with us," Jake growled back at them, also wielding nothing but his hands. They had begun to frost, as if snow was rapidly collecting on them. "Even if we're unarmed."

"What, are you going to beat us with fists and no armor?" the leader laughed back at us, acting as if the appearance of us at the moment was nothing but a joke. It probably would have been a pretty bad joke had Jake and I not been armed supernaturally. "You two are as hopeless as Derek. I bet you two are those 'flying monsters' he saw yesterday."

"Shut the hell up!" shouted a voice from the right side of the group, a scrawny kid closer to our age and wearing an iron helmet only with an iron broadsword in hand. "Besides, the things I saw were in much greater numbers, and they were like three headed dragons, not two other human beings. Why is it so laughable that it's my idea?"

There was a short silence from the group on the other side of the road. "Because you're just a kid!" a woman shouted, and the others started cheering and cawing him. Even though he was with the current enemy, I kind of felt bad for him. He was maybe a little older than me, seventeen or eighteen at the most.

"Would someone just kill those tools already?!" someone else in the crowd shouted, and two of nomads holding deadly bows notched their arrows in our direction, the flint tips readily aimed at Jake and I like blades waiting for the slightest force to project them.

"Ready?" Jake whispered simply to me so that the nomads wouldn't hear, and I nodded.

We wouldn't have to wait for the enemy to start attacking us, though. Instead, the member of the nomads named Derek stabbed one of the women in her unarmored chest, right through her body, ensuing chaos as the nomads directed their attention. "Damn you all!" he shouted above the screams of shock from the many nomads on the edge of the trees.

"That's one way to start a battle, I suppose," I replied vocally to Jake as the nomads closed in on their traitor, who was either helping us or just wanted out of their schemes. The two arrows flew inaccurately in our direction, and I had duck for a second to avoid the flint arrowhead. With that, I blasted a jet of embers on the trees, starting a fire that would burn through the wood and hopefully catch on some of the nomads. "Let's do this."

The minute that the iron blade pierced Alexandria, a twenty seven year old warrior in the group that had been one of the main people to downcast Derek, he knew that he was screwed. Even if the two travelers decided to help him thanks to his unexpected turn of events, it was three on sixteen, and he was most likely going down in an instant.

Wrenching the blade out in what he hoped was a very painful fashion, he parried someone else's sword that had been swinging at him from behind. He had expected the attack, though, and the two iron swords collided in midair. Derek had the advantage, however, as his sword was a broadsword while his attacker's was a thinner blade.

Iron flashed as it hit the ground, and he swung blindly to whoever had attempted to attack him. His sword hit turbulence and he wrenched once again, a groan of pain was exhaled in front of him. Derek couldn't tell who he had hit, though, as all he saw was a red rage that clouded his vision and impaired his actions, almost like being completely wasted. That was the best simile that Derek could think of at the moment, but that was mostly because he wasn't thinking hard.

The red rage wasn't in his head, though. It was actually there, and it was fire. Blazes covered the trees, burning right through the leaves and wood to create a forest fire. Shouts from the other people in his group echoed around him, and the struggle to kill him stopped as they became more concerned with escaping with their lives.

"No! He must die!" a heavyset man shouted in anger, already on fire and standing over Derek with a nasty snarl barely visible amid his burning flesh. "Traitors must die!" An arrows was notched in a bow that was deteriorating from the fire, the flint tip pointed directly at Derek's eye. He let go of the string, and the arrow shot toward Derek from a short couple inches away. Closing his eyes, Derek prepared to receive his final judgment.

But the arrow turned to ice in midair and was blasted out of the way, clattering to the ground a few feet away and shattering into a million pieces like a piece of glass. The man towering over Derek slumped over onto his back, thumping against the ground with force. Derek took a second to catch his breath, and then leapt to his feet when he remembered that the forest was still blazing around him.

Turning back toward the road, he jumped over the bloody body of Alexandria and collapsed onto the cold snow. It was packed against the cobblestone path like a mattress, and he closed his eyes as if to go to sleep right there. The frozen water seemed to burn like acid against his flesh, but it was a better alternative to the fires cutting their way through the spruce trees behind him. The screams of his former friends that he had betrayed bounced off every solid object toward him, filling his ears with the cries of the dying.

"Get up," a harsh voice ordered, the air above him colder as he was covered by the shadow of another person. Derek refused to respond, instead lying on the cold snow still, gasping desperately for his breath like it had never been there. "I save your life, and then you have to nerve to ignore me? I said _get up!_"

This time Derek lifted his head off of the snow, dazed and confused, looking up at the people who stood up over him. One of them was a guy, his eyes staring threateningly at him. He was the one who had spoken to him. The other was a girl, around the same age as the guy, but she didn't look as intimidating. In fact, she looked as if she didn't want to hurt him.

"Crystal, I'll handle the interrogation. We need to know who he is, and why he wanted to defend us. You can't trust these nomads at all," the boy said, not taking his eyes off of Derek. "You get to Ice Alcove and locate and save Lukas. You'll be able to pinpoint his position based off of his smartphone, there's an application on it that allows you to get a map of sorts that will show you where he is."

The girl brushed her hair aside and looked quizzically at the boy. "Why interrogate him if we could just leave him and you could come with me to save Lukas?" she questioned.

"Because there are probably more of his group, and they'll be here in minutes to find and kill us. The bitch needs to talk," the guy rejected in a hostile voice.

"There's no one else in the group except for the people that were attacking today, I swear," Derek countered, "And besides, you can't get me to talk. I'm older than you."

The guy crouched down so that he was on Derek's level, seeing eye to eye with a certain ice cold aura, but Derek couldn't put his finger on the cause. "If you're talking about physically, then maybe you're right. Let's try, shall we?" he growled, punching Derek directly in the right side of his face. The blow hurt, knocking his head back a little bit before it snapped directly back into place painfully. "Mentally, I doubt it. And supernaturally?"

The guy stood up to his feet, ice crystals rapidly forming in the air around him, the air's temperature rapidly descending at an alarming rate. "Try me," he said with a dark grin, staring directly into Derek's soul with a blood red rage.

Although it seemed to Crystal that Jake had gone out of his mind, she turned on her heel and sped off toward Ice Alcove, leaving Jake to deal with the member of the nomad gang. It was obvious that he wouldn't want to be interrupted, and there was a perfectly valid reason for it. Jake had the nomads to blame for the most tragic event of his life.

"Now," he whispered angrily, crouching back down to Derek's level as he prepared to interrogate him on who he was and what his intentions were, "You were saying?"


	5. Swarms

**Hello once more, faithful readers!**

**I come to you with a sincere apology and a reason for not uploading so long. It was a combination of writer's block and life catching up to me. But really good news, first of all: I'm applying for the eighth grade Creative Writing class at my school, and I'm using Chapter 1 of Ignition Point as part of my submission. I did some heavy editing to it, which I have also incorporated onto the website, and printed it and made it look all snazzy.**

**Second, regarding this story in particular, I promised OC's this chapter. And then I was like, but they aren't going to have that big of a role, so why even incorporate them? But a promise is a promise, and although it may be a short appearance, I would like to present to you:**

**Lianne Park from HarryPotterEncyclopedia24 and Leo Alpin from SimonStormCloak! It really pleases me that I got a ton of submissions, and I'd like to thank you all for trying because I was completely bombarded more than I ever have been.**

**And now, let the March Madness of Ignition Point commence!**

**V**

**Swarms**

The root of Jake's hatred for nomads came from a long time ago, when they had changed his life forever. His reality had been perfect for his people for a long time, skyscrapers towering over the people in every city, mobs rendered as a minimal threat thanks to the skill and strategy of the Minecraftian Republic's armies and technology. And yet, the black market for weapons unseen to any other reality was always growing, allowing nomads living in between the cities to assault heavily armed convoys with equally deadly weapons. As the government grew stronger, so too did the nomads, just like in Crystal's base reality.

Jake was merely nine years old when the nomads struck him while on vacation, venturing on the bullet trains between the cities, in particular towards Emerald City from his hometown of Mirage in the Deserted Dunes. Like in Crystal's reality, Mirage was a large vacation destination, built on the other large lake in the country, Lake Paradise. The temperature was never below sixty degrees Fahrenheit, it seemed, and the beaches along the lake were never too crowded because of its vast size. Additionally, it was a large base for technological development in Jake's reality, and where his father worked for most of his life. In the underground labs of Mirage and the ones far away from civilization deep in the Sky Straits were where the Withers had been created, effectively creating the reality's apocalypse.

But that wasn't for another six years after Jake's own destiny was decided. The events of that day were what sent him off to the labs in the Sky Straits to begin helping the technological experiments there. At that point of his life, Jake barely even knew the magnitude of his ability, merely using it to create ice crystals for himself in his room in private so that his parents wouldn't find out about it. Especially in Jake's reality, if he was found to have these supernatural abilities, the scientists, including his own father, would run many rigorous experiments that would sometimes be painful. For a nine year old, that was the worst thing that could possibly happen: locked up in a room by yourself and constantly being forced to drain your own energy so that people can try to replicate your special abilities.

Luckily, vacation was no time for Jake to hear about the very tests being developed by his father that could be used on him. Instead, he laid his head back on the comfortable seat, the desert speeding past him out the window with his smartphone set to play music through a noise blocking headset, his eyes slightly drooping from fatigue of getting up early in the morning to make this particular train. Because of this, he couldn't hear his parents' conversation about what they were doing first once they actually reached Emerald City.

As interested in science as his father was, his mother wanted this weekend to be all about fun, and not about Jake being bored out his mind in a museum about mobs and the myths and truths about them. Instead, they would be going around the town just to simply see the sights of the city, going on tours to the top of every skyscraper, going to different sports events, everything that a young kid would be interested in. For now, however, Jake simply listened to his music without even noticing the passing landscape.

A light on the dashboard that showed the train's status for all the passengers began blinking red, and the bullet train began to slow down. Jake didn't notice except for a slight decrease in motion, but didn't bother opening his eyes. The passengers on the train were skeptical, however. After all, the train was still another twenty miles out from Emerald City, its final destination for this particular route. Jake's parents were among those looking around in confusion as the train slowed to a stop. The red blinking light flashing in front of every person on the train frightened people, and the angered shouts of those thinking they would be late for any appointments that they might have in the city.

If they kept up their shouting and persistence to blame the train company, however, the only thing that they would be late for were their own funerals. For a large pulse of energy went off outside the train, disabling all the electronics and causing it to fall a short two inches from its suspension in the air thanks to the magnets that powered it. An electromagnetic pulse had been set off outside the vehicle, sending the passengers into further panic.

Now, his music abruptly cutting off and being able to hear the screams of other people on the train, Jake looked up at the ensuing chaos around him. The people were as confused as he was, tapping the screen of his smartphone with no response, the black screen a symbol of dread for him. The battery on it had been nowhere close to being dead, and it had abruptly shut off without displaying the message saying it was dead. Along with his phone being deactivated, the red lights that had indicated a technical failure with the train hadn't gone back to green but simply shut off completely. It wasn't a technical failure, but rather sabotage.

As was the explosion that rocked the bullet train, sending the front half skyrocketing into the air while still connected to the other half, causing it to come tumbling down on top of the back half of the train. Luckily it didn't smother it, but crashed down upon it while sliding back down to the sandy dunes that made up the ground the tracks were built on. Jake was sitting in the back half of the train, and flinched to the point that he slid up the chair in a mix of fear and surprise, sparks flying around outside of the window along with smoking shrapnel.

The screams of the people on the train were quieted now, dominated by the sounds of wreckage smashing against other wreckage, almost like a steel plant working to produce sheets of metal from iron. Jake stood up from his seat, brushing some broken glass off of his shorts andlooking around frantically for any other sign of life. Luckily, his parents were regaining consciousness right in front of him, and he helped them up. "Oh, Jake, thank Notch you're okay," his mother breathed, wrapping her son in her arms.

Jake looked outside of the shattered window, where the overturned remains of the front half of the train lied, smoking and on fire in a few spots. He resisted the urge to use his powers to create a jet of water to quell down the flames, as that might arouse suspicion that the crash was his doing. He had found that in old stories and in movies, anyone with supernatural abilities was an easy person to blame for the simplest of failures.

"What the hell just happened?" his father asked skeptically, vaulting over the frame that would have held the shattered glass window. Pulling out an enchanted iron sword, powered with Sharpness II, he led the way forward onto the smoking remains of the train while his wife and son followed him at close distant. He crouched down at a shattered window that led into one of the front cars' passenger sections, peering inside with curiosity. There were pieces of shrapnel on the floor of the car, which was actually the ceiling thanks to it being flipped over in the process of the crash. Along with those were the dead bodies of many passengers, arms and legs twisted into awkward positions that no one could possibly survive.

Chills ran down Jake's spine as he stared inside, the bodies of the damned sprawled all over the place as a result of the crash, an eerie feeling encompassing the whole train car and spreading to Jake from his viewpoint on the sandy ground. The combination of nervousness, the hot desert sun, and the burning flames on the parts of the train made of wood or other flammable materials began to make Jake break intoa sweat. "C'mon, we have to find other people," his father told them, leading them back towards the half of the train that hadn't been completely overturned. The opportunity quickly ran short, however, as an arrow from far off flew toward them and pierced his father between the eyes.

Jake's mother let out a high pitched scream as his father fell to the ground, just as dead as the people inside of the train had been. Tears stung the young Jake's eyes, too young to truly understand the magnitude of what had just happened, too young to fight back against the nomads assaulting the bullet train with ruthless intentions. "Jake, run! It isn't safe here!" his mother shouted, and he began backing away uncertainly as she picked up her deceased husband's sword, staring at the nomads that walked atop the front of what was left of the train, wielding swords and bows, many of them glowing purple to indicate that they were enchanted and therefore a lot more deadly towards the innocent people on the train. Another volley of arrows came flying toward Jake and his mother, two of them hitting her and one of them sticking into the ground at Jake's feet. That was his queue to turn and run, sprinting away from the madness that had become an innocent family vacation. There was a man running back at Jake wearing a police uniform and holding an odd-shaped object in his hands. It was made of sleek black metal, a trigger being fingered by the police officer as he stared down the pillaging nomads.

"Hey, kid, get back there!" he alerted Jake, pointing behind him in a hurry. "There's a small group of refugees, if you're parents are still alive then they'll be there or making their way there!" He disregarded Jake and got down to one knee as Jake ran past him, aiming the front of the object towards the enemies that climbed down the sides of the train to take what they could from the luggage of dead passengers, walking along the top of the train as clear as daylight.

Jake stopped a couple feet behind the man, however, watching him as he squinted his eyes towards the horde of nomads assaulting the train. He pulled the trigger on the small object that he was holding, and a loud noise like an explosion erupted, shattering the air around Jake in a blast louder than the explosion that had caused the train to crash had been. The train's crash had been caused by the nomads setting up TNT under the tracks**, **lighting it so it blew up while the train was passing under it, creating a level of havoc unseen by many.

One of the nomads suddenly gripped his face, red blood spurting from a wound that Jake assumed had come from the weapon that the police officer was holding. "It's just a prototype, they call it a gun. Get out of here!" he shouted, waving him off before returning to shoot another one of the raging nomads with the small gun. Jake slowly stepped away more, keeping his eyes locked on the destruction unfolding before him.

The hot desert sands stretched out in every direction, expanding far beyond his vision as he tried to scope out any other nomads that weren't on the train at the moment. Then he remembered that there was a refugee group at the back side of the train and turned back to run towards that part, hoping to find some support. The loud cracks from the gun in the man's hands sounded like thunder every time he fired at the attacking nomads.

Jake knew the man had told him to go try and find his parents in the small group of refugees, and still continued there in search of some form of protection. The fact that his parents were gone permanently was tearing him up on the inside, but he had to keep going**;** it was the only way to ensure his own safety. There was no way for him to resurrect them, however, and so Jake willed himself to banish the thought from his head and focus on what needed to be done: ensuring his own safety. He really didn't want to have to use his powers over water to aid him as the others might take him as some superhuman freak, so he simply ran towards the back of the train in a blind fear that erased all his senses from his mind.

The small group of refugees would ultimately be saved by a large group of militants arriving from Emerald City, killing off all of the nomads in the process of assaulting the train and accounting for the wounded. Unfortunately, among the wounded there were many dying and some already dead. This included Jake's parents, both of whom were given peace forever at a funeral in Emerald City along with all the others casualties of the assault. What had been planned to be a fun weekend getaway for the Elwoods had instead turned into Jake being orphaned. It wasn't for long, however, as his father's brother Samuel, who worked in the secret technological development towns far east in the Sky Straits, took Jake in to raise as his own.

From there Jake learned all the tools of the trade in his reality's technology, learning how to build his own circuitry out of the most basic materials. Everything had a purpose that could be put to use through electricity, his uncle told him often, and it was up to them to find it. Jake learned more about smartphones, redstone, and even the prototype weapons still under lock and key like the one that he had seen the day his parents died: guns. Under lock and key meant that no one except for the researchers were supposed to have them, and that only meant in the actual laboratories. The man who had most likely saved Jake's life had gotten it off of a black market, but he refused to tell anyone of his encounter with the weapon all those years ago.

In six years the development of Withers began, and after just a few months they were supposedly ready, Jake's uncle one of the heads of the entire project. This allowed Jake to be able to work on the Withers himself for a while, but no one foresaw that they had accidentally mixed in the skeleton's DNA when creating them. All hell broke loose the day that they were activated, and Jake escaped the reality with intent on realizing the missing part of the Creation Story. If he could find the others like him, then he could put a stop to the Withers.

Hatred for the nomads was still part of his blood, and Derek was no exception, despite his attempts at helping him and Crystal. Now, back in the present as Crystal sped off towards Ice Alcove to find Lukas, Jake stared Derek down with eyes intent on ripping apart the nomad's body by some sort of mental capacity. "So, you decided to be a coward and betray all of the people in your little group," Jake spat, walking around Derek while the latter's knees and feet were bound to the ground by a case of ice. "If there's anything worse than a ruthless nomad, it's a nomad that can't even stand by his own friends."

Derek had no response, instead staring straight ahead at the snowy landscape that stretched on far in front of him. He awaited whatever wrath Jake was sure to unleash on him, though he didn't know why Jake hated nomads so much. "Look, I don't know why you see this all as a bad thing. Without my help to start the battle before my entire group attacked you, you would be dead right now," Derek replied bitterly, glancing up at Jake with eyes that were just as angry as Jake's.

"May I remind you," Jake retorted, turning to face him directly and making the ice crawl up a little further up Derek's legs towards his waist, "**t**hat Crystal was the one that started the fire that effectively saved your life back there. So stop trying to give yourself credit for our heroism." Jake continued pacing around in front of Derek, shaking his head with frustration. "I don't even know why I'm interrogating you. After all, there's no information about the Withers that I can squeeze out of you. Maybe I should just kill you and be done with it."

"Withers?" Derek asked, now suddenly intrigued in what his captor had to say to him. "Are they flying, almost like small versions of the Enderdragon?"

Jake had now stopped directly in his tracks, turning back to Derek with an eyebrow. "And three heads?" he asked, and Derek nodded.

"I wasn't able to get that good of a look at them, but it almost did look like there was a three-headed torso and then more bodies being supported on the back of them," he explained to Jake nervously, biting his lip as he remembered the droves of black shapes flying over the sky the day before. "I'd assume that those are what you're talking about."

"What else do you know about them?" Jake sputtered, now crouching down in front of Derek with interest. The ice trap that entombed Derek's legs was slowly fading away, the feeling returning in his muscles as he began to regain sensitivity in that area of his body. If he could keep talking, then maybe he would have enough time to break free from the ice trap and get away from this maniac, and whatever he wanted out of him.

"Nothing else except for the fact that you and this Crystal girl have something to do with them, but only from the last ten minutes of conversation," Derek replied nervously, scratching the back of his head as beads of sweat began to pop up on his forehead. "Where is she now, anyways? Gone off to run for help?"

The ice briefly grew colder and crept up his legs an inch more, but shrank back down as Jake realized that it was simply an empty threat. Derek reminded himself that things like that were not going to be helpful in situations like this when all he needed to do was keep talking to get anopportunity to escape. The more he thought about it, though, where would he go? The towns of the Minecraftian Republic, according to Jake and Crystal, were falling apart in the attacks from these Wither things, and his own gang in the Wild would never take him back in after he betrayed them and killed two, maybe three of their members. Derek took a sideways glance over at the border of the forest, finding the bodies of those that had ridiculed him for so long with relentless effort.

"That's information that I'm afraid I won't be able to tell you," Jake answered, looking off far into the distance in the direction of Ice Alcove. "Information that**, **if falleninto the wrong hands, the entire safety of your reality could be compromised."

"Reality? What are you saying, _my _reality? If that's implying that you come from a different one, then you can just stop lying to me, because I'm not that stupid," Derek exclaimed, trying to keep in laughter the whole way through while Jake stared dead serious at him. "Other realities are just a myth, an urban legend that so many people have sought to prove but have never come close. There hasn't been the right equipment."

"Well, then do I have the perfect explanation for you, don't I?" Jake replied smugly, mocking a sort of enthusiasm as Derek looked at him skeptically. "In my reality, we progressed a lot faster than yours did, and therefore were able to open up wormholes to other realities. You know what, I don't have to explain this all to you. You aren't going to be joining our group, and considering the average nomad's lack of education, you wouldn't be able to get it through your thick skull anyways." Jake frowned as he looked back at the snowy road that led to Ice Alcove, awaiting Crystal's return. "I suppose I'll just watch you for now, right?"

Derek rolled his eyes while Jake's back was turned, amused at the whole oddness of the situation that he was now in. "As if I really need watching," he muttered.

My feet tore through the layer of snow that rested atop of the cobblestone that led towards Ice Alcove from the intersection where Jake and I had been stopped by the group of nomads. Whoever that nomad that Jake had captured, he was about to become very unlucky as Jake interrogated him about… about what exactly? I didn't know what the nomad could possibly know about the Wither, and I thought that it was a blessing that someone outside of our pairing had finally decided to help them in any way.

I suppose that it was Jake's decision what to do with their prisoners of war, if that was what you wanted to call people like this nomad. After all, he had started the group of people with special abilities that would be useful in putting an end to the Withers' bid for domination over all the realities. Or at least, all of them that centered around mine, the so-called base reality. Still, it worried me on what punishments we would enact on a seemingly innocent nomad. There was obviously some hatred towards nomads burning inside Jake, and it was a prejudice that I figured it would be unwise to touch on.

Instead, I focused on the long road ahead of me, snow piled on top of more snow, and even more on top of that. All of that snow made it very hard for me to keep up a steady pace towards the city of Ice Alcove, let alone one as fast as the one I was currently exerting.

It was about ten minutes after I had taken off from where Jake and I had encountered the group of nomads that I first heard the distant explosions of a city being beaten to the ground relentlessly by an entity virtually unknown to this reality. The black forms of the Withers spiraling throughout the sky entered my vision, flying just under the clouds like they had been in Spruce Arbor during their initial attack there. This was most likely a different group of Withers, although I was intent on destroying them with as much hatred as if they had been the ones to take the lives of so many of my townspeople.

The path that I had been following eventually led towards the entrance of the city, an opening in a large wall with barracks and archery towers installed in it. Obviously this defense hadn't done all that much to stop the Withers from their assault on the city. I walked right through the opening in the wall that I assumed was the main entrance of the city, stepping back into the battlefield that Jake and I had left early that morning. Taking out my smartphone with haste, I opened up the application that Jake had instructed me to and watched the radar for some sign of Lukas' signal within the city.

On the green map that outlined the city with a bird's eye view, a small white dot representing me appeared in the center of the screen. As a wave of green light passed through the surrounding areas of the map, a small red dot appeared in a location about five blocks to the east of where I was standing, indicating the location of Lukas. I looked up at the burning city above me, trying to piece together a plan to get down this street with minimal contact with the Withers. That turned out to be nothing except for a fantasy as a group of the mobs came flying down all of a sudden, shooting their explosive skulls at the ground in front of me.

The smell of death hung in the air as I flung myself onto the side alley between the smoky remains of two battered houses. The Wither skulls that had been sent in my direction instead hit the road, creating heavy dents in the already damaged surface. Smoke rose from the spots that they had hit, green just like the color of the skulls that had caused the impacts. In the small alley between the destroyed buildings, I planned a route to get to the building that Lukas was pinned down in, praying to Notch that the Withers were still mainly focused on the center of town in order to cause the most destruction possible.

Realistically, however, I knew that this might not be the case. Unlike Spruce Arbor, Ice Alcove didn't have much of a downtown, but rather important just spread out throughout the city in random places, mixed in with the houses and effectively becoming very confusing for anyone trying to find their way around the city. At least if they had been searching before the buildings had been reduced to ashes, anyways. Right now, landmarks weren't making that much of an impact on a person's sense of direction.

Popping back out of the side alley and examining the damaged street before me, I glanced up at the sky as a precaution. If there were any Withers about to make impact with one of the buildings near me, then it would help if I knew and was able to duck down for cover. Luckily, all I could see were the large swarms of Withers flying high over the center of the town at the moment, apparently focused on a small district of businesses there. That made my job of extracting Lukas from this hellish wasteland a lot easier.

The gates into the city and the minecart station faded in the distance as I followed the map on my smartphone, growing ever closer to the building that Lukas was hiding in. The cobblestone path under my feet was more and more cracked, as if under more and more pressure with every second that ticked by. After sprinting for a minute or two, I reached the building that the red dot was blinking on in the small map. I realized that I wasn't even sure that that was indicating that Lukas was there.

Crouching behind a bench whose legs had been blown apart into small pieces of metal, I looked at the building from the cover with my thermal vision on. There were about ten Wither Skeletons camped out around the entrance of the structure, which looked like a house that had collapsed on itself. Inside of the house was a figure in red in my vision, huddled over and emitting a stronger source of life than the undead mobs standing in my way. I assumed that there was some sort of cellar or basement under the ruins of that particular house, and that was where Lukas was obviously hiding. Now there was the matter of reaching the house safely.

For a second I had forgotten that I could summon fire, and jumped up from behind my makeshift cover to aim a beam of flames at an unfortunate Wither Skeleton. The white hot flames enveloped it in a blanket of smoke and embers, and while that Wither Skeleton crumpled to the ground in a heap, I shot another line of fire at one of the other forms standing in front of me. My enemies were surprisingly helpless against my attacks succumbing almost immediately to the fire that I conjured with little effort. Over time, I could feel my skills increasing, and I convinced myself that maybe someday I would be able to fight the actual Withers.

After only a minute or so, the area was cleared out from the hostile mobs, and I advanced forward to the ruins of the house. Stepping over the smoking remains of the Wither Skeletons, I reached the rubble of the house. It was mostly made out of spruce wood, although there was a substantial amount of cobblestone that made up the ground. Shattered glass littered the ground as well, and I had to step carefully over to the basement door.

Explosions from the Withers off in the distance ricocheted off of every solid object in the vicinity, creating an endless banter. The door into the basement was leaning a little to its side, the hinges seemingly weakened from the explosions. I pushed the door open and stared into the darkness below. Clouds of dust rose, and I advanced down the stairs ten steps until I reached the bottom, where the air felt like it was charged with electricity. I had forgotten what power Lukas had, if Jake had even told me, but I suspected that it was electricity from the way that the air was tingling oddly. My smartphone's radar had the red blinking light exactly where I was standing at the moment, and I looked around the room.

Darkness had enveloped me completely now, and I started a small fire in my hands so that I could see. The dust flew around me increasingly, and I stared at a small form against the blackened wall. It was his eyes that stood out, dark blue and seeming to pulsate with electricity while staring directly at me in the darkness. "Who are you?" he muttered quietly, blinking and then looking down at the fire in my hands. "Are you with Jake?"

"Yeah, I'm the new girl, Crystal," I replied, looking around warily at the darkness that surrounded us. "And you are Lukas, correct?"

There was a small flash of movement on the other side of the room, and a light bulb hanging from a string over the center of the room flickered on. It was a dim light, but it was enough that I could see his facial features and vice versa. I extinguished my fire and flinched as an explosion closer to the demolished building than the others rang out from above us. "The Withers are going to be closing in on our location, especially since there are two of us with elemental powers in one building," he warned me, standing up and walking over to the stairs that I had just walked down. "Where is Jake, anyways?"

Jake. I had completely forgotten about him. He would be able to find us using the smartphone radar if he did end up coming to the Ice Alcove after us, but there was no guarantee that that was going to happen. For all I knew, the nomad that he had captured might have escaped Jake and even injured him. I doubted it, considering Jake's powers over water and ice, but I had learned that you can't doubt anything.

"He's back on the road to Ice Alcove, interrogating a nomad that was among a group that attacked us," I answered, turning back to the stairs as Lukas continued toward me cautiously. "We should get moving, the faster that we get out of Ice Alcove, the better. The other two people that we need to meet up with are going to be in or around Jungle Junction at this point, and we need to get back to Jake also. And personally, I really don't want to have to deal with the Withers here."

Lukas nodded in silent agreement and followed me up the cracked stairs until we were back up on the surface, smoke rising from the center of Ice Alcove in terrifying amounts. It almost looked like the sky was turning black in the distance, with the combination of the smoke and the swarms of Withers flying through the sky at intense speed. "Yeah, I really don't want to have to fight those things," I commented, and the two of us began jogging back to the city limits.

"How do I know that I can trust that you're with Jake?" Lukas asked, looking at me skeptically. Now in the light of the sun and not a dim light bulb, I could see that his face at faint smile lines in it, and I realized that he must be a good person if he was getting those at this young of an age. Not the best detective skills, but I was decent.

"Would Jake just pick up anyone for the group?" I queried, conjuring a beam of fire and blasting a long stretch of the cobblestone ground with it. The flames seemed to lick the ground, spreading out in long blankets of fire so that they enveloped the ground in a white hot blaze. There was one thing that I hadn't expected, however. The cracks in the ground grew larger, splintering the cobblestone apart so that the ground almost looked like it was suffering from an earthquake. Then I realized something really important that I should have thought about before.

Ice Alcove was literally built on top of a frozen lake, the cobblestone ground all carefully placed so that if the weather got warmer, the ice wouldn't melt and create a lake in the middle of the town. With all of the pressure that was being applied to the cobblestone throughout the Wither's attack, the cover was sure to be depleted in many places. Any sudden impact could crack it apart, and a large increase in temperature might superheat the water in some places. This was precisely what my fire was doing and the explosions from the Withers, and I immediately stopped my fire as I realized the consequences of what was going on.

"We have to leave, _now_," I told Jake frantically, picking up the pace along the cobblestone path as the cracks in the ground began spreading at an alarming rate. "Come on, Lukas, this is really dangerous!"

"Well, yeah, there are plenty of Withers that want to take all of our souls, me and you in particular," he replied, following me at a brisk pace. "What could be a larger threat right now?"

"The frozen lake under the city, it's going to burst back up to the surface under all this pressure!" I alerted him, now just four blocks from the edge of the city. It was then that the unbelievable happened, however. The ground broke apart under our feet, hot water spewing up in hot jets of water. "Oh, Notch!" I shouted in surprise, narrowly jumping around a crack in the ground that widened to three feet or so, shooting boiling water into the sky.

"Hold on!" Lukas yelled back at me, grabbing my arm hastily and implying me to do the same to him. The air around us seemed to warp around us at his will, and the ground left my feet. Or rather, my feet left the ground. Slowly, but still, I was actually flying or levitating or something like that. Rapidly cooling water came raining down from the sky, eventually reaching the limit of its force and coming back down on whoever was left in Ice Alcove.

I was gripping tightly to Lukas' shoulders, jets of water showering us every two seconds. Suddenly, a burst of speed caused Lukas and I to fly away from the city as it crumbled into the ground, what was formerly the base of the town becoming the source of its downfall. Along with the water that now filled the air, a heavy wind had picked up, and Lukas tried desperately to steer me away from the hot geysers opening in the city. There was one pillar of water that Lukas narrowly dodged, although I caught a good amount of water in my shirt and hair.

At last, we had made it outside the area that was built on top of the frozen lake, and Lukas slowed to a stop before descending to the ground again. My hands were clenched around a good amount of fabric that he was wearing, fingernails cutting into his skin ever so slightly. Once my feet touched solid ground, I released him and stood on the snow dusted cobblestone path that would lead us back to Jake. "That was… amazing!" I breathed in sheer astonishment, although Lukas took little notice to my reaction. Instead, he stared in wonder at the sight of Ice Alcove thanks to the Wither attack.

"We need to get out of here. That collapse of the city will probably hold off the Withers for a little bit, and we need to take advantage of that," Lukas told me, staring worriedly into the distance. "I sense a large trouble looming in the air."

"You can do that?" I queried.

"Electrical frequencies," he replied shortly, barely finding the time to look back over to me and shrugged modestly. "It's nothing really, just a simple power that I learned a while ago."

With that, the two of us began the sprint back to wherever Jake was waiting for us on the long cobblestone road that would lead back to the intersection of four cities. From there we would proceed to Jungle Junction, and from there on with our quest to stop the Withers.

The old cabin was dark and gloomy in general, and Leo Alpin found that to be very depressing. Not that anything would cheer him up at the moment, sitting here in the cabin with absolutely nothing to do except wait for Lianne to get back while she scouted. It seemed that everything that could possibly have gone wrong was just as they had been about to be finished with recruiting their team of kinetic people, as Leo liked to refer to them. It wasn't the best name, but it would do at the moment. Being their own species, kind of, the name for them didn't really have to have much pizazz. So instead, it was short and simple. They were people, and they had kinetic powers. Big deal, the name said. In reality, it was a very big deal.

Dark and gloomy was supposed to be Leo's middle name, after all. He in particular had power over the shadows, although this seemed especially odd to him considering his personality traits. A person with control over darkness and invisibility and stuff was supposed to be quiet, reserved, almost to the point of creepiness. Instead, Leo was laid back and outgoing. Heck, his favorite color was yellow. This all created a personality crisis inside of his head, and this made Leo quiet and reserved at times. But not as usual as you would expect from a person like him.

Leo, as stated above, has control over anything related to darkness and shadows. Things like invisibility, and the ability to bend shadows or erase them completely, including those of other people or objects. This all came in use when using stealth, which was often needed when searching for that last person with powers in this reality.

Leo hadn't had the luxury of finding one, as he was the one to join just before Crystal. In turn, Crystal's reality was the first he had ever visited besides the one that he had grown up in. The idea of traveling to other realities had seemed to silly to him at first, but he had grown into it. After all, he would never see his family or friends again until he completed the task of defeating the Withers.

Unfortunately, fourteen year olds don't have the greatest sense of self confidence. Leo highly doubted that he would make it out of this voyage alive, and if he did he would be very grateful to Notch. At the moment, there was nothing that he could do to ensure his survival, and simply waited. Lianne was certainly taking a while, and Leo looked in the cracked mirror that hung crookedly in the wall. Through the reflecting glass, Leo saw a face that normally looked cheerful and bright, but was dark in the hollowness of the abandoned cabin. The dark of the cabin outlined his dark green eyes so that they pierced into the mirror. He was wearing a yellow sweatshirt and dark gray sweatpants that barely hung over his leather boots, which he always wore even when not in a combat situation. His dark hair was matted over his forehead, and as he swept it back up into the mess of hair, he got a short look at some pimples that had begun to pop up near his hairline, which was usually hidden by loose strands of hair. Maybe Leo wasn't the best looking guy, but his personality usually made up for it.

Usually, as in since he had found out there were other people like him. In Leo's reality, one where the Nether and Aether were accessible to people of certain professions, he had been in an inner circle of friends that kept to themselves. It had been nearing the end of summer break when Lianne herself found Leo in his reality's version of Emerald City, living in one of the tall skyscrapers that dominated the skyline. With working water elevators and stairs that seemed to ascend to the heavens, Leo had made it very hard for Jake, Lukas, and Lianne to find him. Luckily, however, Lianne had been the right person for the job, considering her abilities.

At that moment, a small black bat fluttered into the dark cabin with the squeaky floorboards through a broken window next to the cracked mirror that Leo was currently looking at and settled down on an old chair. Leo shifted his gaze to the small form as it rested its hind legs on the frail chair, gazing up at him. "Any news?" he asked the bat glumly.

With a flash of white light, the bat transformed back into Lianne Park, sitting in the chair and looking back up at Leo. She was sixteen, with black hair tied behind her head in a crudely made ponytail. Her blue green eyes stood out significantly less than Leo's did, although there was a small white light that danced in the center of her pupils. She was miraculously skinny, wearing a dark red T-shirt and gray pants almost identical to Leo's, and a pair of black trainers. The white light in her eyes signified her own ability; one to change into any mob that she desired, which was becoming very useful as their journey went on.

Just now, after all, she had been scouting the area as a bat to see if Lukas, Jake, or the new girl, Crystal, had arrived yet. Lianne and Leo were hiding out in a small cabin on the outskirts of Jungle Junction, the building suspended above the ground high up in the mahogany trees. From here, the two of them could see the odd terrain of Jungle Junction, which was mainly built in the underbrush far below, and the clear waters of the Great Lake to the north. On the western side of the Great Lake was the road that led to the intersection that Crystal and Jake had previously been attacked at, and now there was little to do except to wait for the others to arrive. They had originally planned to meet in Emerald City, but that plan had fallen apart quickly.

Lianne, individually, felt especially bad for Leo because of the situation that she had wrenched him into. She had found him while he was testing his invisibility using the sonar impulses that all bats have, and since she couldn't see him but knew he was there, she was able to pinpoint that he was the person she was looking for. She had confronted him and told him of their mission, but Leo had initially refused to come with. And so, after three days of rejection, Lianne had simply kidnapped him and brought him to a shelter where the rest of them were hiding out in the Sky Straits, near the portal that would take them to the last reality. There, Leo was finally convinced of their true intentions, but Lianne still felt bad about it.

Lianne herself had been found by Lukas in her reality, one where hostile mobs were much rarer and refused to actually harm common Minecraftians. Rather, they would mind their own business, but still only spawned at night and grew calmer or even died in the sunlight. This was the main reason that Lianne had always found herself fascinated by the mobs, and her ability to turn into them was widely accepted by the other people in her reality. They were a peaceful people, and in turn Lianne had been brought up to be a thoughtful and caring person with no intention to hurt anything or anyone. That is, until she saw the Withers destroying Crystal's reality merely to kill her. The Wither and Wither Skeleton were the only two mobs from the Overworld that she could not transform into, and this was because they hadn't existed in her reality. Therefore, she had never been able to learn their attributes to the level that she could become one of them, whereas any other mob from the Overworld was fair game. She couldn't transform into Nether, Aether, or End exclusive mobs, however, because of the lack of availability of a portal to those dimensions in every reality except for Leo's.

Now, sitting here in this dark cabin with Leo, she shook her head no to his question. There was no news of Jake or the others arriving in Jungle Junction yet. "I think that our time is running out. It won't be long before the Withers launch an attack on this city given our presence here," she elaborated solemnly.

Leo took out the scythe that he had powered with dark energy, his weapon of choice built so that it could reach through walls and turn invisible when he did. The scythe had always made Lianne think of Leo as the grim reaper, because the whole idea of shadows and stuff plus the fact that he used a scythe as a weapon all resembled the figure that represented death. And yet, through all of these odd assumptions, Lianne still felt bad for Leo. It was the least she could do.

Leo nodded grimly, looking back to the cracked mirror and staring in his reflection, now with Lianne sitting behind him and looking just as solemn. There was still a vast sense of hope that the others would make it to Jungle Junction soon, but that was fading all too quickly.

Across the Great Lake and into the Frozen Frontier once more, Jake awaited Crystal and Lukas' return to him from Ice Alcove, which was still being attacked by the Withers despite it erupting in jets of hot water. And still, the Withers came flooding into Spruce Arbor, destroying the remains of the city desperately as the short trace of Crystal and Jake still hung there. The swarms were growing, and our heroes' time was fading. The race back to the portal in Sky Straits had begun, but the kinetic people would have to fight their way there.

Fighting had become routine for most of the members of the group. Their next task was nothing new, but still threatening just the same.


End file.
